The Pillars of Hercules

There was Harry Jipping, a developer, from Reno, Nevada, who said, “Malta—is that an island, or a country? Isn’t it part of Italy? You mean it’s got its own money and all that?” and “That black stuff—what’s it called? Right, caviar—that Cornacchia guy’s always chomping on it.” Harry was traveling with his wife, Laverne, a Frisbie from Grand Junction. The Joneses from New York, the Smiths from Toronto, the Greens from Wooton Wauwen, England, Mrs. Doris Brown from Lauderdale, Florida, the Burton Sperbers from Malibu. And Jack Greenwald from Montreal, who wore a blazer with solid gold buttons, and his regimental tie of the Household Cavalry, and who addressed the waiters in French, usually to describe his personal recipes which he insisted on their delivering to the head chef, Jörg, and seldom spoke to another passenger on board except to say, “Can you tell me what a drongo is?” or “I’m down to two desserts.” Mr. Greenwald’s wife was the former actress Miss Constance Brown.

The Zivots from Calgary, the Alfred Nijkerks from Antwerp, Belgium, the Sonny Prices from Sylvania, Ohio, and the Rev. Deacon Albert J. Schwind from Beach Haven, New Jersey, Señor and Señora Pablo Brockmann from Mexico City, Mr. Ed and Mrs. Merrilee Turley from Tiburon, California. Mrs. Blanche Lasher from Los Angeles was on her twelfth cruise; so were the Ambushes and the Hardnetts.

And Mrs. Betty Levy of London and the Algarve was on her thirtieth cruise and had been up the Amazon. “I love your books, I’ve read every one of them,” Mrs. Levy said to me. “Are you writing one about this cruise?”

“No, unless anything interesting happens,” I said, so confused by her directness that I realized that I was telling her the truth.

The Fritzes, the Norton Freedmans, the Louie Padulas—all these people, and more, boarded the Seabourn Spirit that day in Nice.

• • •

The summer had passed. It was low season again. I needed an antidote to Albania and the shock I had gotten in Greek Corfu, an island leaping with chattering tourists that reminded me of the rock apes on the slopes of Gibraltar. I had gone home and tended my garden, and then in late September I went to Nice. I joined this cruise. I had never been on a cruise before, or seen people like this.

Many were limping, one had an aluminum walker, Mrs. Fuller was in a wheelchair, some of the wealthiest looked starved, a few were thunderously huge, morbidly obese. Like many moneyed Americans who travel they had a characteristic gait, a way of walking that was slow and assured. They sized up Greek ruins or colorful natives like heads of state reviewing a platoon of foreign soldiers, with a stately and skeptical squint, absolutely unhurried. That, and an entirely unembarrassed way of laughing in public that was like a goose honking ten tables away.

“You’ve got to be a mountain climber to get up these stairs!”

“Why don’t they turn the air conditioner on?”

“Who’s that supposed to be?”

It was the color portrait on B Deck of the Norwegian King and Queen—two of Scandinavia’s bicycle-riding monarchs, King Harald V and Queen Sonja. The ship was Norwegian, registered in Oslo.

Some were rather infirm or very elderly or simply not spry, with a scattering of middle-aged people and only one child (Miss Olivia Cockburn, ten, of Washington, D.C., traveling with her grandparents). The majority were “seniors,” as they called themselves, who had the money or time to embark on such a cruise. Hard of hearing, the passengers mostly shouted. Their eyesight was poor. Eavesdropping was a cinch for me, so was note-taking.

“This is our eighth cruise—”

“Did you do the Amazon—?”

“Vietnam was very unique—”

Most of them, on this luxury cruise through the Mediterranean, were sailing from Nice to Istanbul. Some were going on to Haifa. Betty Levy was headed into the Indian Ocean with the ship. The cost for this, excluding airfare, was one thousand dollars a day, per person.

I was a guest of the shipping company. There was no disgrace in that. It often happens that a writer is offered free hospitality, in a hotel or on a ship. Few newspapers or magazines actually pay a penny for the trips their writers make, and so travel journalism is the simple art of being slurpingly grateful. It posed no moral problem for me, but because my writing made me seem as though I was continually biting the hand that had fed me, my ironizing was nailed as “grumpy” and I was seldom invited back a second time. That was fine with me. In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.