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Sea route calculator

A very quick sea route calculator showing you the distance in nautical miles from any of the vessels AIS position to any port. Find the shortest route, ETA, days in sea, bunker ports along the route and estimated bunker consumption.  Save and share the routes.

Add ECA, SECA zones, (IMO and local zones), daily updated marine weather, piracy info and sea ice conditions to your route.

Calculate from a port, to any ports, with several port options or consecutive ports.

A very quick sea route calculator for laptops and mobiles

The sea route calculator is available in both products; ShipAtlas and ShipIntel. It will give you the shortest route from any vessel's AIS position in the map to any port or combination of ports, and find the distance, time and ETA. You can also route between ports. If you want to change the route on web; click and drag the route (same as you do in Google maps), and the route will quickly be re-calculated.

Why use this Sea Route Calculator?

The technology Since there are no roads at sea, we have been using many different technologies while developing the Sea Route Calculator. We have created a network of triangles, visibility graphs, machine learning and other technologies. Then we have added information about canals and straits constrains to avoid routing vessels through canals if they are too large for the canal constrains. We have also added AIS tracks for different type and size of vessels to find where the different type of vessels have been sailing in the past. ‍ Thus this Sea Route Planner is not a navigational tool for navigators. The pitch Might be the only sea route calculator able to route from any vessel's AIS position to any port on mobile and web super quickly and accurate FOR FREE and gives you the ETA, days at sea and bunker consumption. You can compare the ShipAtlas sea route calculator with any other sea route calculators there are. ‍ You can add bunker ports available along the route, find canal constrains and do consecutive sea routes. You can route several vessels to one port, and find when they will arrive (ETA), and you can find alternative routes for one vessel to reach a specific port. You can save sea routes. We will continue to invest in the sea route calculator since a sea route should be one of the backbone features in any maritime software.

Mobile and laptop Use the sea route calculator from your laptop or mobile device and find time in sea, ETA first port, distance in nautical miles, bunker consumption, from any of the vessels AIS position. Turn on the marine weather forecast layer if you want to estimate delay due to bad weather. The weather is updated every 24th hour with a 15 days forecast. Turn on the ECA / SECA zone layer and find the bunker consumption. The sea route calculator is excellent for cases such as: your vessel is en route to Tubarao, and your broker asks if your vessel can go to Madre de Deus instead and when she will arrive. You can calculate the sea distance from any of the vessel’s position to any ports to find the deviation time from the vessels existing position, and the ETA to the possible new destination. Click on the vessel and the sea route calculator icon on the vessel card. On web you can click and drag the line to add waypoints or alternative routes (just as you do in Google maps).

Combine layers of information with the sea route calculator

You can add the layers of information you prefer like, and here are some of the layers you can combine with the Sea Route Calculator: 

• Daily updated marine weather layers (wind, currents, perception, waves) and a 15 days forecast for wind, perception.
• Daily updated piracy information.
• Daily updated ice conditions.
• ECA / SECA zones (local and IMO defined zones).
• Switch between default maps and satellite mode.  
• Access information about canal constrains (draft, LOA and beam). If your vessel is bigger, we will route her the shortest way around.
• Add bunker ports and learn where you find bunkers available, bunker grades and prices. We daily update the bunker information.
• Add Polar codes, Load Line or International Navigating Limits (INL).

Click on the layers you add and find detailed information about the specific layer.

The Sea Route Calculator is a backbone of our software products

We have a dedicated team working with the sea route calculation so while you are getting familiar with the sea route calculator, we will continue improving it and make it even smarter. We will add more features and layers of information to solve more user cases, and we will make sure it is super responsive on all your devices.

Available on desktop and mobile

An application you just love to use!

We are dedicated to developing ShipAtlas based on user feedback, so your feedback is highly welcomed.

We invest in having active and happy users, and we want to make it easy to reach us. So we are here to answer your questions, listen to your feedback and support you almost 24/7.

If you have ideas or wishes, want to propose improvements, or find bugs, please send us a chat so we can discuss.

Information

Helpful links.

Cargo calculator

What’s distance & time.

It’s a logistics application created to estimate distances and times between sea routes under particular parameters.

How it works?

You insert your origin and destination and then the system displays data about distances and time estimates from SeaRates database.

What’s the information based on?

Open sources combined with information from various shipping lines and nautical agencies. This information has been collected for over ten years and is regularly updated.

Get your planning under control

Few professional shipping companies are able to answer this question “When will I get my shipment?” to the client’s satisfaction. Our transit time system lets you fill this gap in seconds The clean interface is visually appealing and easy to use. Keeping track of your delivery time is important if you want to provide clients with accurate estimates after order placement. This is what we’ve been doing at SeaRates for many years and are now sharing with the rest of the world!

Distance & Time made simple

Often customers are given a very rough estimate of their delivery. “It will take two to four weeks”, for example, or “it can be delivered by Friday if you place your order in the next 12 hours”. This gives a frame of reference to the customer, but all other things being equal, given a choice between several companies with similar prices, the customer will choose the one with the fastest delivery service. So precise information is always preferred, since it is often necessary to prepare or be personally present for the delivery. Not to mention that properly timing your delivery is crucial to avoid work gaps in production. Save yourself some unwanted trouble by installing our Distance & Times tool to help you compete in the marketplace!

Usually the transport companies integrate the app with Logistics Explorer to also provide customers with instant shipping rates from/to anywhere in the world. It can also be enhanced by Route Planner to also schedule shipments easier and track sea lines

Distance & Time

Make your site better by integrating tools from searates, shipping distance & time calculator.

Distance & Time is web application, which allows to calculate distances and transit time between two points using different modes of transport.

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Fast and easy to work with Voyage Estimation

SEAMETRIX MAIN FEATURES OVERVIEW

SEA DISTANCE CALCULATOR

Seametrix serves over 30,000 ports and terminals, offering fully customisable sea routing combinations with the most accurate sea distance results by far. Rhumbline & Great-Circle navigation methods are calculated on the fly by different servers, providing our users with real-world nautical distances by sea.

VOYAGE ESTIMATION

Our voyage estimation module is made in such a way that makes it easy, quick & sleek to work with. By fully modifying your desired sea routing, you can have your customised itinerary exported to our voyage estimation module, and accurately estimate sea freights, voyage costs and ship expenses, in less than a minute!

SEA ROUTES API

Seametrix offers by far the most detailed and accurate sea distances and sea routing API, with a lot of navigational parametirizations, such as Great-Circle and Rhumbline Navigation, SECA avoidance, Piracy avoidance, many On/Off passages, Indonesian Archipelagic Sea Lanes Compliance, & usage of either ports or co-ordinates.

TRY SEAMETRIX!

A state-of-the-art sea distance calculator and voyage estimation software, what we do best, over 30,000 ports & terminals.

We provide sea distances between any port of the world in any country, marinas, oil terminals, bunker hubs, off-shore terminals, oil-gas fields, anchorage areas and more. Our sea distances software serves over 30,000 sea/river ports & terminals worldwide. No other marine software covers such a broad and detailed water navigational network!

Detailed sea routing network

We didn’t follow the pre-calculated port distance tables root; instead, we created the most analytical & thorough sea-routing network to date, and we serve it brilliantly and on-the-fly! Our sea routing is based on many years of data analysis from navigational charts & NASA satellite ship-tracking statistics, thus bringing clarity to the maritime & shipping industry.

Fast & clever algorithms

Sea distances are not as easy to calculate as the routes on land, since the sea routing combinations are billions. Therefore, our sea routing software’s algorithms have been developed by very experienced and specialised software engineers. They are fast & they cleverly exclude certain areas based on draft and other navigational restrictions.

Fully customisable routing

Other than nautical distances between ports, Seametrix offers co-ordinate to co-ordinate routing, by allowing users to insert any co-ordinate or just click on any point on the map. Thus, you can customise your itinerary as you wish, start/end your voyage, or pass by any waypoint you want your vessel to head through.

Great Circle VS Rhumbline

Seametrix is the only sea distance calculator that offers correct and real-world Rhumbline & Great-Circle nautical mile calculation results. Each navigation method is calculated by a different server, with different data sets and algorithms, and offers highly accurate nautical mile calculation results, for either navigational method.

Easy & modern User interface

Seametrix has a very modern and user-friendly interface, developed with latest technologies, and designed to offer a pleasant and easy environment to work with, for calculating nautical distances between any point at sea, as well as estimating freight & voyage costs. Finding and accessing any setting or information has become as easy as it gets!

Over 1,000 routing points

Sea routes followed by Masters in shipping are usually the shortest. Nevertheless there are various exceptions, thus our sea network contains over 1,000 alternative routing points! Combined with the option to make any waypoint function as routing point on the fly, your route can literally be 100% tailor-made as your itinerary requires!

Voyage estimation module

Seametrix offers a handy & easy to work voyage estimation module, which smartly combines simplicity & practicality. Freight estimations will literally take you less than 1 minute, with all the information & fields placed in a fully logical sequence. Routing can also be customised from within the voyage estimation module, for highly accurate freight estimates!

Marine weather forecasts

Seametrix also offers a marine weather forecast module, with both global and local coverage, and info such as ice coverage and thickness, wave and swell height and direction, sea currents, sea temperature, wind speed-direction and stream, barometric pressure etc. Several other marine weather parameters are integrated for more accurate prediction.

Sailing schedules, Vessels routes

• Atlanticargo
• Avana Logistek
• Balaji Shipping
• BLPL Singapore
• Brointermed lines
• Canadian National Railway
• Canadian Pacific Railway
• CHINA SHIPPING
• Containerships Group
• CSAV NORASIA
• DB Schenker
• Dong Fang International Investment
• Dongjin Shipping
• Dong Young Shipping
• Econ Shipping
• ECU Worldwide
• Emirates Shipping Line
• Gold Star Line
• Gothong Southern Shipping
• Hamburg Sud
• Hanjin Shipping
• HAPAG LLOYD
• Heung-A Shipping
• Hyde Logistics
• Interasia Lines
• ITALIA MARITTIMA
• Kambara Kisen
• Korea Marine Transport
• Kuehne + Nagel
• Linea Messina
• MAG shipping
• Maldives Ports
• Mariana Express Lines
• Maxicon Container Line
• Medkon Lines
• Meratus Line
• Minsheng Ocean Shipping
• Nirint Shipping
• Pacific Direct Line
• Pan Continental Shipping
• Pasha Hawaii
• Perma Shipping Line
• Pollux & Castor
• PSL Navegacao
• Qatar Navigation
• Roberto Bucci
• Royal Arctic
• Seaboard Marine
• SeaCastle Inc, (Interpool)
• Sea Star Line
• SENATOR LINES
• SETH Shipping
• Sinokor Merchant Marine
• Sofrana ANL
• Sofrana Unilines
• Star Shipping
• STX Pan Ocean
• TOTE Maritime
• Trailer Bridge
• TransContainer
• United Arab Shipping
• VL Logistic
• Wan Hai Lines
• Waterfront Container
• W.E.C. Lines
• WorldWide Alliance
• YANG MING (YML)
• Zim World Freight

Maritime Voyage Optimization Software for Emissions Reduction

Voyage Optimizer is the industry’s most advanced and comprehensive maritime voyage optimization solution for commercial shipping.

It combines AI-powered speed optimization, weather routing and performance routing to help charterers create profitable, low emission routes.

Create Optimal Maritime Voyage Plans

Safe, Profitable, Low Emission Routes

With Voyage Optimizer you’re able to specify an outcome for a voyage – such as an ETA or reduced emissions – and receive an optimal ECDIS-ready route. Voyage Optimizer helps you manage competing voyage priorities and create routes that are more profitable, result in fewer claims and help reduce vessel emissions.

Voyage Optimizer does this through advanced machine learning models that optimize a voyage for weather, speed and route performance. And because our models are trained on data from the vessel itself, you can be sure of the highest levels of accuracy for the route.

A Complete Maritime Voyage Optimization Solution

Detailed Voyage Insights

It enables you to know exactly when a vessel will reach a specific port so you spend less time liaising with the providers of ancillary services. It also helps you improve communications with the vessel master by sharing accurate data on the vessel’s progress and performance.

Voyage Optimizer Features

Pre-voyage planning.

For every voyage, our managed services team will work with you to confirm where your vessel needs to go and what the best route outcome would look like. You can decide on a range of variables you need the route to be optimized for, both in terms of vessel speed (ETA, maximize Time Charter Equivalent or optimize for cost) and route optimization (distance, fuel cost or emissions). And all of our planned routes will take into account any areas where slow sailing is required, such as Emission Controlled Areas (ECA), High Risk Areas (HRA) and Marine Protected Areas (MPA).

Using our speed, weather and performance models, our managed services team delivers an ECDIS-ready route based on your overall objectives, as well as a number of alternative routes and options. Once the route is confirmed this will then get delivered by our experienced team directly to the vessel’s master.

During The Voyage

Post-Voyage Reporting

Voyage Optimizer Insights

Nautilus CII Simulator: Helping You Improve Your CII Grades

Log-in Logística Intermodal Partners With Nautilus Labs To Reduce Emissions and Optimize Voyage Profitability

Nautilus Labs’s Voyage Optimization now offers Route Optimization to further reduce emissions while maximizing commercial returns

Increased Voyage Profitability and Sustainability Through Dynamic Voyage Optimization

Eastern Pacific Shipping Leverages Nautilus To Reduce Its Carbon Footprint and Optimize Voyage Profit Uplifts

A Competitive Advantage: Real-Time Voyage Optimization

What is voyage optimizer.

Voyage Optimizer is a maritime voyage optimization solution from Nautilus Labs. It is designed to provide shipping operators and charterers with decision support for finding an optimal route for getting to a specific destination. It combines weather routing, speed optimization and ship-specific performance models with an experienced managed services team to deliver ECDIS-ready shipping routes.

How Does Voyage Optimizer Work?

Voyage Optimizer uses ship-specific performance models, speed optimization, and weather routing to plot a shipping route that is optimized for a range of outcomes, including ETA time, fuel consumption and voyage distance. The speed and consumption models are based on data from the vessel itself, creating a highly accurate ‘digital twin’ of that vessel. This means these models can deliver highly accurate predictive voyage plans. Combined with the weather routing it means the optimized routes provided by Voyager Optimizer are accurate and ECDIS-ready.

How Can Voyage Optimizer Help Reduce Emissions?

The Crucial Role of Voyage Planning and Route Optimisation in Maritime Operations

• Redefining success at sea

In the vast expanse of the world's oceans, where unpredictable weather, safety concerns and environmental regulations converge, the maritime industry faces a myriad of challenges. In this dynamic seascape, voyage planning and route optimisation emerge as critical factors that can redefine success for ship owners, managers, charterers and operators alike.

• Fuel efficiency and cost savings

Embarking on a journey towards economic viability and competitiveness, maritime stakeholders increasingly turn to advanced weather routing systems and speed profile optimisation. By collaboratively leveraging real-time data, ship managers and charterers can plan routes that not only sidestep adverse conditions but also optimise vessel speed for enhanced fuel efficiency. 

Ship managers and charterers seek routes strategically planned to take advantage of favorable weather conditions, capitalising on prevailing currents, like the Gulf Stream or Kuroshio Current, for instance, which can significantly boost speed and fuel efficiency. Additionally, vessels can avoid areas prone to adverse weather conditions, such as heavy storms, hurricanes or turbulent seas, prioritising the safety of the vessel, crew and cargo. Through the dynamic use of real-time data, these stakeholders can continually assess evolving factors, making informed decisions, adjusting routes and optimising vessel speed to harness the most advantageous conditions along the way.

The result? Significant reductions in fuel consumption and operating costs, benefitting all parties and ensuring a smoother sail in turbulent economic waters.

• Better operational planning

In an era marked by heightened environmental consciousness, voyage optimisation is a crucial ally for maritime stakeholders. Together, leading ship owners, operators, managers and charterers actively strive to minimise their carbon footprint and adhere to stringent environmental regulations by meticulously fine-tuning routes and vessel speeds. This strategy aligns their operations with the growing expectation of responsible business practices, fostering a shared commitment to ecological responsibility within the industry.

Voyage optimisation not only helps reduce emissions, it also plays a crucial role in meticulous operational planning, providing bridge leaders and crews with the tools and high-level visibility needed to empower compliant operations along routes, so that crews are prepared to comply with regulations within environmentally protected zones. These areas are often closer to land, where certain discharges may be prohibited, or speeds are restricted. This detailed planning significantly diminishes the risk of unintentional infractions that could harm the environment and tarnish the company's reputation.

• Improved schedule adherence and reliability

For ship managers, operators, and charterers, the promise of improved schedule adherence is a game-changer. Voyage optimisation, driven by historical data and predictive analytics, empowers stakeholders to navigate the seas with unprecedented precision. By avoiding delays caused by adverse weather or suboptimal routes, reliability becomes a hallmark of their services, translating into enhanced customer satisfaction, trust and the potential for attracting new business opportunities.

• Optimised fleet performance and resource utilisation

In the pursuit of operational efficiency, operators and ship managers rely on voyage optimisation tools for a comprehensive view of fleet operations. This isn't just about making informed decisions on maintenance schedules, route planning and fuel consumption; it's a practical shift toward optimising overall performance. This shift has a ripple effect, with vessels being maximally utilised, minimising idle time, and ultimately leading to efficiency gains that positively impact economic outcomes across the industry.

As the maritime industry charts a course into the future, the significance of voyage planning and route optimisation cannot be overstated. From fuel efficiency and environmental sustainability to improved safety and operational performance, the benefits are far-reaching. As stakeholders embrace these technological advancements, they not only navigate the challenges of today but also set sail towards a more prosperous and sustainable future on the high seas.

Navigation from LR OneOcean consolidates voyage planning activity — including optimisation by time, cost and fuel — into one streamlined workflow, allowing team members aboard and onshore to compare routes and evaluate all relevant voyage planning criteria on one interface. This high-level view, with zoom-in access to granular navigational data, enables the best possible decision-making to remain competitive and forward-thinking in a rapidly-shifting industry.

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• Ships' routeing
• Maritime Safety

The practice of following predetermined routes for shipping originated in 1898 and was adopted, for reasons of safety, by shipping companies operating passenger ships across the North Atlantic. Related provisions were subsequently incorporated into the original SOLAS Convention.

Traffic separation schemes and other ships' routeing systems have been established in most of the major congested, shipping areas of the world, and the number of collisions and groundings has often been dramatically reduced.

IMO's responsibility for ships' routeing 

IMO's responsibility for ships' routeing is enshrined in SOLAS chapter V, which recognizes the Organization as the only international body for establishing such systems.

Rule 10 of the COLREG prescribes the conduct of vessels when navigating through traffic separation schemes adopted by IMO. 

IMO's responsibilities are also determined under the United Nations Convention on Law of The Sea (UNCLOS), which designates IMO as "the competent international organization" in matters of navigational safety, safety of shipping traffic and marine environmental protection.

Governments intending to establish a new routeing system for IMO's adoption, or amend an existing one, should submit proposed routeing measures to the IMO's Sub-Committee on Navigation, Communications and Search and Rescue ( NCSR ), which will then evaluate the proposal and make a recommendation regarding its adoption by the Maritime Safety Committee.

Ships' routeing measures adopted by IMO to improve safety of navigation at sea include, for example:

• traffic separation schemes;
• two-way routes;
• recommended tracks;
• deep water routes (for the benefit primarily of ships whose ability to manoeuvre is constrained by their draught);
• precautionary areas (where ships should navigate with particular caution);
• areas to be avoided (for reasons of exceptional danger or especially sensitive ecological and environmental factors).

IMO publication  " Ships' Routeing "

Ships' routeing measures adopted by IMO are contained in the  IMO publication   Ships' Routeing , which is regularly updated.

The publication includes general provisions on ships' routeing, which are aimed at standardizing the design, development, charted presentation and use of routeing measures adopted by IMO. The provisions state that the objective of ships' routeing is to "improve the safety of navigation in converging areas and in areas where the density of traffic is great or where freedom of movement of shipping is inhibited by restricted searoom, the existence of obstructions to navigation, limited depths or unfavourable meteorological conditions".

Elements used in ships' routeing systems

Elements used in ships' routeing systems include:

• traffic separation scheme : a routeing measure aimed at the separation of opposing streams of traffic by appropriate means and by the establishment of traffic lanes
• traffic lane : an area within defined limits in which one-way traffic is established. natural obstacles, including those forming separation zones, may constitute a boundary
• separation zone or line : a zone or line separating traffic lanes in which ships are proceeding in opposite or nearly opposite directions; or separating a traffic lane from the adjacent sea area; or separating traffic lanes designated for particular classes of ship proceeding in the same direction
• roundabout : a separation point or circular separation zone and a circular traffic lane within defined limits
• inshore traffic zone : a designated area between the landward boundary of a traffic separation scheme and the adjacent coast
• recommended route : a route of undefined width, for the convenience of ships in transit, which is often marked by centreline buoys
• deep-water route : a route within defined limits which has been accurately surveyed for clearance of sea bottom and submerged articles
• precautionary area : an area within defined limits where ships must navigate with particular caution and within which the direction of flow of traffic may be recommended
• area to be avoided : an area within defined limits in which either navigation is particularly hazardous or it is exceptionally important to avoid casualties and which should be avoided by all ships, or by certain classes of ships

See also: MSC/Circ.1060 , as amended -  Guidance note on the preparation of proposals on ships' routeing systems and ship reporting systems .

Proposals on ships' routeing and ship reporting systems by Governments

Templates are available for proposals on ships' routeing and ship reporting systems to be submitted to the NCSR Sub-Committee. 

T hese can be obtained by sending an e-mail to the Secretariat of the NCSR Sub-Committee.

RELATED TOPIC

Weather routeing .

Weather conditions can also affect a ship's navigation, and in 1983 IMO adopted resolution A.528(13)  on  Recommendation on Weather Routeing , which recognizes that weather routeing - by which ships are provided with "optimum routes" to avoid bad weather - can aid safety. It recommends Governments to advise ships flying their flags of the availability of weather routeing information, particularly that provided by services listed by the World Meteorological Organization.

Further information

SOLAS regulations V/10 (Ships' routeing) and V/11 (Ship reporting systems) 

MSC.1/Circ.1060, as amended - Guidance note on the preparation of proposals on ships' routeing reporting systems

MSC.1/Circ.1608 - Procedure for the submission of documents containing proposals for the establishment of, or amendments to, ships' routeing systems or ship reporting systems

Historical background on Ships' Routeing

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This is an incredible visualization of the world's shipping routes

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Each year, more than 11 billion tons of stuff gets carried around the world by large ships. Clothes, flat-screen TVs, grain, cars, oil — transporting these goods from port to port is what makes the global economy go 'round.

Now there's a great way to visualize this entire process, through this stunning interactive map from the UCL Energy Institute:

You can use the toggles at the top of the map to break down the ships by type — container ships (yellow), dry bulk carriers (blue), oil and fuel tankers (red), gas carriers (green), and ships transporting vehicles (purple) — or zoom in on different regions.

The researchers assembled data from the thousands of commercial ships that moved across the ocean in 2012. They then worked with the data visualization studio  Kiln to make this map. Here are a few neat highlights from playing around with the thing:

1) You can trace the outlines of continents solely by looking at shipping routes

You can toggle the map so that it only shows major shipping routes and nothing else. Even here, you can clearly see the continents, save for the region above the Arctic circle, where few ships travel. (Though that may change as summer sea ice keeps receding .)

You can also see a few of the major river routes where large ships can navigate — like the Amazon River in northern Brazil, or the St. Lawrence River that allows ships to travel from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes, or the complex Volga-Baltic waterway in Russia .

It's also easy to spot some hubs of the global economy with this map. The red lines above trace ships carrying liquid fuels — crude oil or gasoline. As you can see, both Louisiana and Texas are major hydrocarbon hubs. There are also thick red lines streaming out of the Valdez Terminal in Alaska, which is at the southern end of the Alaska Pipeline, bringing oil from fields in the north.

2) There's a major shipping choke point around Malaysia and Singapore

One of the most important shipping lanes on the planet is the Strait of Malacca , the shortest route between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which you can see here as a congested line of ships traveling past Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. About 40 percent of world trade passes through this strait each year, including much of the crude oil that goes from the Middle East to China.

But the narrow strait is also vulnerable to disruption — and in recent years, there's been an uptick of pirate attacks in these straits. Technically, the three bordering states — Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia — are responsible for security in this region, defending it against piracy, but because it's so crucial, the US, China, India, and Japan have all provided assistance in securing the region.

Unfortunately, there's no easy way around. Ships that can't fit through the strait (its minimum depth is about 82 feet) have to take a detour of thousands of miles further south.

3) In 2012, most ships steered clear of Somalia

Starting around 2005, armed pirates from Somalia began stepping up raids on ships traveling around the Horn of Africa. Some analysts argued that illegal fishing by foreign boats in the region had initially driven many Somali fishermen to form armed militias to defend their waters. But those groups later turned to seizing cargo ships and holding the crews for ransom.

By 2012, pirates were costing commercial ships between $900 million and $3.3 billion per year . And, as you can see from the maps above, many ships were steering clear of Somalia's coast after emerging from the  Mandeb Strait between Yemen and Djibouti, which leads up to the Suez Canal.

But that was also peak Somali piracy. In the years since, raids seems to have declined dramatically . Shipping companies increased their on-boat security while various militaries deployed armed ships to patrol the region. By most accounts, it seems to have worked.

4) Ships have to move in neat routes through tight spaces like the English Channel

The researchers note that "while ships can move freely through the open ocean, routes are predetermined closer to land." This is evident in the English Channel, where ships need to move in nice, neat lanes — as if it were a two-lane highway.

5) You can see ships waiting their turn at the Panama Canal

Each year, nearly 15,000 ships pass through the Panama Canal connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Only a few ships can go through the narrow locks at a time as they are slowly raised and lowered using water from the lake above. So ships anchor outside the canal, sometimes for weeks , while they wait their allotted turn. (All told, about 30 to 40 large ships pass through the canal each day.)

To handle the next generation of large container ships, the Panama Canal is undergoing an expansion , with an additional set of locks on both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Even this expansion, however, won't be able to handle the very largest set of container ships — which can be as big as four football fields laid end-to-end.

So what do those behemoths do? Nicaragua has thought about building its own, bigger canal to accommodate these ships, but that may never get built (and is a fiasco for a whole host of reasons ). So, for now, the big ships still have to go all the way around South America.

6) The world's ships are a major source of carbon dioxide emissions

There's a huge cost to all this shipping. The ships have to burn a lot of bunker fuel, and in 2012, they ended up emitting some 796 million tons of carbon dioxide . The researchers note that that's more than "the whole of the UK, Canada or Brazil emit in a year." Or, put another way, shipping is responsible for some 3 to 4 percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, this is still much more efficient than shipping all that stuff by land or air. Still, researchers have been looking into ways to shrink the shipping industry's carbon footprint. Nate Berg ran through some of the best ideas here : "From technological improvements such as retrofitted rudders and propellers to enhanced weather routing, shipping companies are eyeing many ways to improve their efficiency."

Further reading: The environmental cost of shipping our stuff is huge. Can we fix that?

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

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The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Australian Antarctic icebreaker RSV Nuyina hit by technical issues and industrial action

• In short: The RSV Nuyina's recent resupply mission in Antarctica was disrupted by technical issues with the ship's two main cranes, limiting the amount of cargo that could be offloaded at Mawson station.
• It adds to a growing list of problems plaguing the vessel, prompting renewed calls for the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) to secure a second ship.
• What's next?  The AAD is working with the vessel's private operator Serco to make any necessary repairs to the cranes, but the ship's next voyage could still be delayed by ongoing industrial action.

The $528 million RSV Nuyina is considered a "lifeline" for Australia's stations in Antarctica.

But the ABC has confirmed the icebreaker's two main cranes malfunctioned during its recent resupply mission to Mawson station.

It meant only a portion of the ship's cargo could be offloaded ahead of the upcoming winter season.

"The resupply of Mawson research station last month was disrupted by bad weather and technical issues with the forward cranes of the RSV Nuyina," the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) said.

The cranes, which can carry up to 55 tonnes each, are designed to access dozens of 20-foot containers held in the ship's cargo holds.

The AAD said repairs at sea allowed one of the cranes to return to "partial operation".

"That allowed for some critical supplies for Mawson station to be accessed," it said.

"This was transported to station by helicopter."

The AAD declined to outline the amount or type of cargo that was unable to be offloaded.

However, it said Mawson station had sufficient supplies, including food and fuel, to ensure the safety of expeditioners over the coming months.

'Bordering on the farcical'

The technical issues affecting the cranes are the latest in a series of problems that have plagued the vessel since it first arrived in Hobart in 2021.

"You'd expect a new icebreaker, particularly of the magnitude of the Nuyina, to have some teething problems," Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson said.

"[But] this bordering on the farcical."

Over the past three years, the issues have included:

• Motor faults that emerged ahead of its initial arrival in Hobart in 2021
• Software glitches that delayed its maiden voyage to Antarctica
• Propulsion system problems that required extensive repairs in Singapore
• Stability concerns that resulted in a ban on the ship going under the Tasman Bridge to refuel .

Documents obtained by the ABC under Freedom of Information laws also show some crew members were forced to don breathing apparatus after smoke was seen in the helicopter hangar last year.

The "thermal event", which happened while the ship was carrying out a medical evacuation across the Southern Ocean, was caused by a problem with the ship's de-icing cabling.

There were no flames, and the voyage was able to continue on its mission without further delay.

However, the Nuyina's ongoing issues have had a significant impact on the AAD's finances.

The AAD suffered a $42 million budget blow-out last year, due in part to the cost of leasing back-up resupply vessels.

Its annual fuel bill has also increased by almost $1 million because the ship now has to refuel in Tasmania's north-west instead of its home port of Hobart.

The mechanical issues also resulted in the cancellation of the Nuyina's first-ever dedicated marine science voyage last year, raising questions about whether it can fulfil its research capabilities.

Senator Whish-Wilson, who is chairing a parliamentary inquiry into the AAD's funding issues, said the Nuyina's problems highlighted the need for a second icebreaker.

"With only one ship, not only are we not able to do the critical science that is absolutely necessary at this point in history … but we're struggling to resupply our bases, or provide the logistical support that they need."

He said it begged a bigger question: "Have we made a significant error in strategy by only having one icebreaker?"

"I think all the evidence is screaming that we need to have two ships supporting the Australian Antarctic Division and the critical work that they do in Antarctica."

Ongoing industrial action threatens voyage

The Nuyina returned to Hobart late last week following its seven-week voyage to Mawson Station.

The AAD said it was working with the vessel's private operator Serco to assess the "status" of the cranes and conduct any necessary repairs.

But a separate issue has the potential to delay the ship's final voyage of the 2023-24 season — a 1,500-kilometre resupply mission to Macquarie Island, scheduled to begin later this month.

A dispute over pay and conditions has prompted engineers and marine officers to take industrial action against Serco.

They are refusing to load or offload cargo, run the ship's propulsion system or refuel the vessel until their demands are met.

They say an attempt by Serco to reduce their pay during the industrial action has hardened their resolve.

"They won't be cowered by Serco's actions and the bans remain in place," Australian Institute of Marine and Power Engineers (AIMPE) senior industrial organiser Nathan Niven said.

"We just need Serco to come to the party in relation to these negotiations so that the vessel can be loaded and fuelled and set a course for Macquarie Island."

In a statement, Serco said it had offered "generous" pay increases over the next four years.

"Our aim is to reach an agreement that will benefit our crew over the long-term," a spokesperson said.

"However, our offers continue to be met by the AIMPE and AMOU unions with various work bans designed to disrupt important resupply and maintenance operations.

"Serco remains committed to negotiating in good faith and reaching an agreement that is fair for all, and sustainable."

Serco said it was seeking assistance from the Fair Work Commission to limit further disruption to Australia's Antarctic operations.

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Iranian special forces seize cargo vessel in a key shipping lane, state media reports

Iranian special forces seized a container ship near the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping lane to the Persian Gulf, the state-run IRNA news agency reported Saturday.

Navy special forces from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used a helicopter to board and seize a container ship, IRNA news reported, adding that the MSC Aries was being transferred to Iranian territorial waters.

Video on the state-owned news network Press TV showed what it said were people using a rope to drop onto the ship. NBC News could not independently verify the footage.

The move could escalate tensions in a region reeling from the war in Gaza and a recent strike, suspected to have been carried out by Israel, that killed senior Iranian military officers. Since Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 terror attack and mass hostage taking and Israel’s subsequent full-scale assault on the Gaza Strip, more than 33,000 people have been killed and 75,000 others have been injured.

And attacks by Iran-backed  Houthi militants  on ships in the Red Sea have already rocked global trade as several major shipping lines and oil transporters suspended their services through the waterway.

As companies avoid the Suez Canal, which feeds into the Red Sea, and opt instead to go around Africa to get to the Indian Ocean, it can add up to 14 days to a shipping route, incurring higher fuel costs. And since ships take a longer time to get to their destinations, delays in container and commodity deliveries are inevitable.

IRNA said the Portuguese-flagged ship was operated by the Zodiac shipping company, which is part of Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer’s Zodiac Group. Zodiac said in a statement that the ship is managed and operated by the U.K.-based shipping company, MSC, which confirmed Saturday that the MSC Aries had been “boarded by Iranian authorities via helicopter.” The shipping company also said there were 25 crew members onboard and that it is working with “relevant authorities” to ensure their safety.

Iranian authorities did not immediately issue a public statement on the incident.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency said on X that the MSC Aries had been seized 50 nautical miles northeast of the Fujairah, an area close to the Strait of Hormuz that forms the entrance to the Persian Gulf.

When asked by NBC News, the Israeli government said it had no comment on the ship’s seizure. But Israel Katz, the country’s foreign minister, said on X that Iran was “now conducting a pirate operation in violation of international law.”

In a separate statement Saturday that was not in response to the incident unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz, Israeli military spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said that Iran would “bear the consequences for choosing to escalate the situation any further.”

“Israel is on high alert. We have increased our readiness to protect Israel from further Iranian aggression. We are also prepared to respond,” he said.

The attack comes after a strike, suspected to have been carried out by Israel, on the Iranian consular building in the Syrian capital of Damascus earlier this month. Israel did not take responsibility for that strike, but Tehran vowed revenge.

Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior member of the Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ’ elite foreign espionage group, was killed in the blast. He was the most senior Iranian official to be killed since Gen. Qassem Soleimani was targeted by an American airstrike in 2020.

Five military advisers in the IRGC, Iran’s immensely powerful military and political organization, were also killed in the attack. While Israel and Iran have avoided direct conflict for years, the IRGC has helped Tehran wage a shadow war with Israel across the Middle East.

After the attack, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , said at a prayer ceremony celebrating the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on Wednesday that Israel “must be punished, and it will be punished.” Since the building destroyed was a consular building, he said, it amounted to an attack on Iranian soil.

The United States has signaled its support for Israel and worked to persuade Iran to stop short of a significant escalation. While increasingly critical of the way Israel is pursuing the war in Gaza, President Joe Biden has pledged that America’s “commitment to Israel’s security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad.”

Henry Austin is a senior editor for NBC News Digital based in London.

Federal criminal investigation opened into Key Bridge crash

The FBI has opened a criminal investigation focusing on the massive container ship that brought down the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore last month — a probe that will look at least in part at whether the crew left the port knowing the vessel had serious system problems, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Authorities are reviewing the events leading up to the moment when the Dali, a 985-foot Singapore-flagged ship, lost power while leaving the Port of Baltimore and slammed into one of the bridge’s support pillars, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing probe.

Just after dawn Monday, dozens of law enforcement officials dressed in all black began arriving at the Dali — where the crew has remained since the crash — pulling up to the ship’s bow in numerous boats and climbing aboard using a ladder. The FBI later confirmed that agents were on board, and the Justice Department said authorities were conducting a “court-approved search.”

Baltimore bridge collapse

The news of the criminal investigation, which one official said is being handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland, came the same day that multiple private law firms separately announced that they had been retained to represent the Baltimore mayor’s office and some of the men who were working construction on the bridge when it collapsed. The moves signal an escalating effort to seek accountability and determine what caused the crash that left six of the eight men dead, a question that both the independent National Transportation Safety Board and the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation have been working to answer in separate inquiries since the collapse March 26.

Jennifer Gabris, an NTSB spokeswoman, said that the board’s investigation would continue and that a preliminary report was expected in early May.

The Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation will pause evidence collection, but it will still be able to analyze evidence it has already gathered to inform safety efforts such as new regulations or inspection campaigns, according to a Coast Guard official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigations.

An attorney representing Grace Ocean Private Ltd., which owns the Dali, and Synergy Marine Pte Ltd., the ship’s manager, did not respond to a request for comment.

President Biden and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) have both previously said that they intend to hold accountable any parties deemed potentially liable for the destruction of the bridge, but they have yet to announce any legal action. Baltimore Mayor Brandon M. Scott said the city has hired DiCello Levitt and Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky Trial Lawyers to work with the city’s own legal team to take “decisive action” against the owner, charter, operator and manufacturer of the Dali and “any other potentially liable third parties.”

Erek L. Barron, the U.S. Attorney for Maryland, said his office does not comment on criminal investigations but asserted in a statement that “the public should know, whether it’s gun violence, civil rights abuse, financial fraud, or any other threat to public safety or property we will seek accountability for anyone who may be responsible.”

His office did not respond to questions about what issues the Dali may have experienced before its port departure and how the actions of the crew might be criminal.

Systems issues on vessels such as the Dali can become the basis for criminal charges if they are discovered by those responsible for the ship but not properly remedied before a ship departs, said Todd Lochner, an Annapolis-based admiralty attorney. Lochner said investigators could be trying to weight the legal standard of whether the Dali was “reasonably fit for the intended voyage” when it left the Port of Baltimore en route to Sri Lanka.

“You may not send a vessel to sea in a known unseaworthy condition,” Lochner said, though what exactly constitutes as “unseaworthy” in this case would probably be debated in court.

“There are all kinds of things that can lead to an unseaworthy condition,” he said.

On Capitol Hill last week, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said her investigators were focusing on the Dali’s electrical issues, adding that her team believes there may be a connection between the ship’s lights going out and the power loss to its engines in the moments before the crash.

Homendy said Hyundai, the South Korea-based company that manufactured the engine-room equipment used on the Dali, sent experts to the United States to download electrical data from the ship and look at its circuit breakers.

Attorneys from Stewart Miller Simmons Trial Attorneys and Kreindler & Kreindler said Monday they will be conducting their own independent investigation into the Key Bridge collapse on behalf of the victims they are representing: Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, José López and Julio Adrian Cervantes Suarez. Fuentes and López died after they fell into the Patapsco River when the bridge collapsed. Cervantes, who also fell into the frigid waters, is the only person to survive the fall.

The attorneys said they intend to fight the petition filed in federal court on April 1 by the Dali’s owner and manager, asking a judge to cap how much money responsible parties could be asked to pay in liabilities. One of the attorneys, Justin Miller, said their probe is intended to complement those conducted by the NTSB, the Coast Guard and the FBI. “The details that we need are not the details that they need,” he said.

L. Chris Stewart, another lawyer for the three victims, said that in past cases, the existence of a federal criminal investigation has proved “very effective” in the pursuit of civil accountability. “It leaves no stone unturned,” Stewart said.

The victims’ lawyers said they take issue with the Dali’s owner and operator seeking to limit their liability to about $43.6 million.

“Imagine telling that to grieving families,” Stewart said, “that while they are planning a funeral, the owner of the boat is in court trying to stop the city, state and victims from filing claims.”

In the three weeks since the Dali crashed into the Key Bridge, dive teams have been able to recover four of the six people who died in the collapse, including Maynor Suazo Sandoval , Dorlian Castillo Cabrera and Fuentes. A fourth person was recovered over the weekend, officials with Unified Command announced Monday, but he was not identified per the request of his family.

Authorities had previously identified the three other missing members of the construction crew as López and two other men, Miguel Luna and Carlos Hernandez, all of whom are presumed dead.

The recovery mission was paused after days of searching the Patapsco River’s cold and murky waters. Officials have said they are now focusing on clearing the river of debris and relocating the Dali to shore, but at still looking for those who died among the wreckage.

James Harkness, chief engineer for the Maryland Transportation Authority and a member of the Unified Command, said Monday the cleanup is proceeding on the timetable laid out in recent weeks.

He said officials plan to have a 35-foot deep temporary channel open in the coming weeks and clear the entire shipping channel by the end of May. Harkness said crews have removed 1,000 tons of debris from the river. He said 31 ships have used two small temporary channels to get into and out of the Port of Baltimore.

Justin Jouvenal and Ian Duncan contributed to this report.

Famous figures who had Titanic tickets but didn't make it on board

• As the Titanic was the height of luxury in 1912, some celebrities had tickets for its maiden voyage.
• But not all of them ended up boarding the ship.
• J. Pierpont Morgan and Milton Hershey were among those who missed the disaster.

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 still captivates us today, with numerous books, a multibillion-dollar movie , museums , and, controversially, expensive tours of the wreckage available.

Interest in the ship led to another maritime tragedy last year when an OceanGate submersible went missing on the way to the wreckage and was eventually confirmed to have imploded , killing all five people on board.

In the aftermath, stories emerged about people invited to participate in one of OceanGate's trips but decided against it — much like, more than 100 years ago, how people were fascinated with those who had almost been on the Titanic.

Here are seven notable figures, some of whom were among the richest people in the world, who were supposed to sail on the Titanic's maiden voyage but didn't — and four well-known people who were booked to go on a future journey with the ship.

Milton Hershey, the founder of Hershey's, sent the White Star Line a $300 check to reserve a spot on the Titanic, but he ended up sailing home on the SS Amerika instead.

As they aged, Hershey and his wife, Catherine, spent their winters on the French Riviera. In December 1911, the couple left for another extended European vacation. For their return journey, Hershey wrote a $300 check from the Hershey Trust Company to the White Star Line to reserve places on the maiden voyage of the company's brand-new ship, the Titanic.

According to Lancaster History , pressing business matters forced Hershey to cut his vacation short, and he left Europe just days before the Titanic would set sail, instead heading home on a German liner called the Amerika, which would later warn the Titanic about the dangerous amount of ice.

Hershey's canceled check is still in the possession of the Hershey Community Archives , and you can view it online.

J. Pierpont Morgan — yes, J. P. Morgan himself — had a personal suite on the Titanic and had attended its launch party in 1911. But he extended his French vacation and missed the sinking.

"I've never been able to find an authoritative 1912 source explaining the exact reason why J. P. Morgan canceled his passage on the Titanic," the Titanic expert George Behe told Reuters in 2021. Some speculated that the reasons were that he was in bad health or having issues with customs because of his art collection.

However, we know that Morgan, the cofounder of General Electric, International Harvester, and US Steel, was also the founder of the International Mercantile Marine, which in turn owned White Star Line. According to The Washington Post , he was even on hand to witness its 1911 launch.

"Monetary losses amount to nothing in life," Morgan told a New York Times reporter after the sinking. "It is the loss of life that counts. It is that frightful death."

Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel Prize winner who invented the radio, opted to head to the US three days earlier on the Lusitania, forgoing a free ticket on the Titanic.

You might know that Marconi was considered a hero after the sinking of the Titanic because his invention, the wireless radio, helped ships in the surrounding area find where to look for the lifeboats.

But did you know he was almost on board the ship himself?

His daughter Degna wrote in her 1926 book, "My Father, Marconi," that he was offered a free ticket aboard the Titanic. But because his stenographer got seasick, Marconi opted to sail to the US on the Lusitania because he trusted that ship's stenographer more than Titanic's, Degna wrote.

Henry Clay Frick, the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, missed the sailing of the Titanic because his wife sprained her ankle in Italy and needed to be hospitalized.

Visitors to New York City might recognize Frick's name from the Frick Collection or the Henry Clay Frick House. He was an important industrialist and a patron of the arts — and he was close to sailing on the doomed voyage.

"The Fricks booked the suite first, and then Mrs. Frick sprained her ankle while they were in Europe buying art and touring and things; so, they stayed behind to get medical attention," the historian Melanie Linn Gutowski told CBS News Pittsburgh in 2012.

"The suite that they booked, that some historians think that they booked, was some kind of savior suite in a way," she continued. "Everybody who booked it managed to survive either by not being on the ship, or jumping into a lifeboat at the last minute."

Eventually, the tickets made their way to J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line. Controversially, he was one of the few men who made their way onto a lifeboat and survived. He was criticized for this for the rest of his life.

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt canceled his ticket on the Titanic at the last minute. He was on board the Lusitania when a German U-boat sank it in May 1915.

As a member of the prominent Vanderbilt family, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was a well-known member of New York society, so there was media coverage when it was revealed he'd narrowly escaped the Titanic.

Unfortunately, just a few years later, he was aboard the Lusitania , a British ocean liner that was sunk by German U-boats in 1915. He was one of the 1,200 passengers who did not survive the attack.

The American journalist Theodore Dreiser was persuaded by his publisher to take a cheaper ship home across the Atlantic.

Dreiser wrote about his brush with disaster in a chapter of his 1913 memoir, "A Traveler at Forty." Slate said the section about the Titanic, "The Voyage Home," was "one of the most gripping chapters in the memoir."

Dreiser wrote that he wanted to sail home with the rich and powerful people aboard the Titanic to get a peek at how the other half lived, but added that his publisher convinced him to sail home on the Kroonland, a cheaper ship, two days before Titanic sank.

"The terror of the sea had come swiftly and directly home to all," Dreiser wrote, according to Slate. "To think of a ship as immense as the Titanic, new and bright, sinking in endless fathoms of water. And the two thousand passengers routed like rats from their berths only to float helplessly in miles of water, praying and crying!"

John Mott, another Nobel Prize winner, was also offered a free ticket on the ship, but he chose a smaller ship, the Lapland, instead.

Mott, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was the longtime leader of the YMCA, was another near-miss. Gorden R. Doss , a professor at Andrews University, said that Mott came close to death a few times.

First, he skipped the Titanic and opted for the Lapland. Three decades later, in 1943, he narrowly avoided a train crash.

Mott said, "The Good Lord must have more work for us to do" upon hearing about the sinking, according to Sotheby's .

There were other celebrities who had tickets to sail the Titanic in the future, had it not sank. J.C. Penney was set to sail on the ship's next trip from England to New York.

According to the Smithsonian Magazine , the founder of JCPenney was set to sail on the Titanic's second  voyage from England to the US.

Frank Seiberling, the cofounder of Goodyear Tires, was booked to return to Southampton on the Titanic's next voyage.

The Akron Beacon Journal reported that Seiberling, the cofounder of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, and his wife frequently traveled to England and were huge admirers of English architecture. But one of their trips was postponed when their ship out of the States, the Titanic, sank.

So was John Alden Dix, the governor of New York.

Smithsonian Magazine also reported that Dix, the governor of New York from 1911 to 1913, was on the passenger list of the Titanic's return trip to England.

Henry Adams, a historian who was a descendant of President John Adams and President John Quincy Adams, was also booked on this trip.

"My ship, the Titanic, is on her way," Adams wrote in a letter on April 12, 1912, "and unless she drops me somewhere else, I should get to Cherbourg in a fortnight." As history tells, Adams was never able to board the ship and was forced to book passage elsewhere, The New Republic's Timothy Noah wrote.

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