the voyage first fleet

HISTORIC ARTICLE

May 13, 1787 ce: 'first fleet' sets sail for australia.

On May 13, 1787, the “First Fleet” of military leaders, sailors, and convicts set sail from Portsmouth, England, to found the first European colony in Australia, Botany Bay.

Geography, Social Studies, World History

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On May 13, 1787, a group of over 1,400 people in 11 ships set sail from Portsmouth, England. Their destination was a vaguely described bay in the continent of Australia, newly discovered to Europeans. In a stunning feat of planning and navigation , nearly all of the voyagers survived and arrived in Botany Bay several months later.

A wide variety of people made up this legendary “First Fleet .” Military and government officials, along with their wives and children, led the group. Sailors, cooks, masons, and other workers hoped to establish new lives in the new colony .

Perhaps most famously, the First Fleet included more than 700 convicts . The settlement at Botany Bay was intended to be a penal colony . The convicts of the First Fleet included both men and women. Most were British, but a few were American, French, and even African. Their crimes ranged from theft to assault. Most convicts were sentenced to seven years’ “transportation” (the term for the sending of prisoners to a usually far-off penal colony ).

The First Fleet departed from Portsmouth, then briefly docked in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. The ships then crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where they took on huge stores of supplies. Then the fleet sailed back across the Atlantic to Cape Town, South Africa, where they took on even more food, including livestock . The main portion of the journey was across the entire Indian Ocean, from Cape Town to Botany Bay —they traveled about 24,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) throughout the entire journey.

Botany Bay was not as hospitable as the group had hoped. The bay was shallow, there was not a large supply of freshwater, and the land was not fertile . Nearby, however, officers of the First Fleet discovered a beautiful harbor with all those qualities. They named it after the British Home Secretary, Lord Sydney. The day the First Fleet discovered Sydney Harbor is celebrated as Australia’s national holiday , Australia Day.

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Last Updated

October 19, 2023

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First Fleet

Transportation to the Australian colonies began in 1788 when the First Fleet, carrying between 750 and 780 convicts plus 550 crew, soldiers and family members, landed at Sydney Cove after an eight-month voyage. Over the next 80 years, British courts sentenced more than 160,000 convicts to transportation to Australia.

Arthur Bowes Smyth (1750-1790) was the ship’s surgeon aboard the Lady Penrhyn , one of the ships in the First Fleet. In his journal, Smyth wrote of the harsh conditions aboard the Lady Penrhyn whose passengers included 101 female convicts. The names of the convicts are listed on pages 17─20 of Smyth’s journal.

Smyth, Arthur Bowes,  Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth, 1787 March 22-1789 August,  1787,  http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-233345951

1. This is the fourth page from the journal that Arthur Bowes Smyth kept during his voyage to Australia on the Lady Penrhyn (one of the ships of the First Fleet). Share the page with your students and invite them to use ‘history detective’ skills to find the following information:

• What was the Lady Penrhyn ?
• Can you find the list of passengers? Name one of them.
• Can you find the list of marine officers and men? Name one of them.
• Can you find the list of boys? How many were there?
• Listed next to people’s names, can you find some of the jobs they did? List two of the jobs.
• The lists on this page do not include the names of most of the people on board the Lady Penrhyn . Who else might have been on board? Why might their names have been listed separately from those on this page?

Use the information the students have found to brainstorm ideas about why the First Fleet came to Australia. You may like to use the artwork Convicts Embarking for Botany Bay , painted by Thomas Rowlandson (1756─1827) in 1800, to stimulate the brainstorm.

Rowlandson, Thomas, 1756-1827. (1800).  [Convicts embarking for Botany Bay] [picture] / T. Rowlandson . http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-135232630

English artist Thomas Rowlandson depicts convicts being loaded onto a rowing boat at the beginning of a long voyage to the other side of the world. The two corpses hanging from a gibbet are a gruesome reminder of the alternative to transportation.

2. Read the following (edited) extracts from Bowes Smyth’s journal between March 1787 and January 1788 with your students.

Friday 22 March came on board the ship at the Mother-bank near Portsmouth  (page 5) Friday 20th a fine day with a fresh breeze—a large and beautiful rainbow seen this day about 8 o’clock without any rain preceding its appearance, which the seamen say is a sign of the wind. Several large dolphins seen astern which would not take the baits (page 33) Wednesday 19 a very wet day and frequent very violent squalls of wind, about 11 o’clock a.m. some person fell overboard from the Charlotte … have not learnt who fell overboard or if they were saved   (page 58) Saturday 1st December This day one of the convicts on board our ship ( Margarett Brown ) scalded her foot very bad. Tis very extraordinary how very healthy the convicts on board this ship in particular, and indeed in the fleet in general have been  (page 78) Tuesday 25 December 1787 Xmas Day We are now about two thousand miles distant from the South Cape of New Holland, or Van Diemen’s Land, or otherwise Adventure Bay, with a most noble breeze which carries us at 8½ knots per hour, which we hope will enable us to see land in about a fortnight  (page 97) 26 January … about 7 o’clock p.m. we reach the mouth of Broken Bay, Port Jackson, and sailed up into the cove where the settlement is to be made … the finest terraces lawns and grottos with distinct plantations of the tallest and most stately trees I ever saw in any noble man’s gardens in England cannot exceed in beauty those which nature now presented to our view   (page 131)

As a class, discuss what these extracts tell us. Ask your students the following questions:

• What were some of the challenges faced by the people on the First Fleet during their voyage to Australia?
• Why do you think the people on the ships were trying to bait the dolphins?
• What pleasant experiences does Bowes Smyth write about in these extracts from his journal?
• What was Bowes Smyth’s first impression of Sydney Cove?

3. The experiences of the convicts on the Lady Penrhyn would have been very different to Bowes Smyth’s experience as ship’s surgeon. Ask your students to imagine they are convicts on board the ship. Each student should write four journal entries that show what the convicts may have experienced during the voyage from Portsmouth to Sydney.

Other Treasures sources that relate to the concepts explored in this source include: Early settlement , Strange creatures

The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia’s First Nations Peoples – the First Australians – as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of this land and gives respect to the Elders – past and present – and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Cultural Notification

Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this website contains a range of material which may be considered culturally sensitive including the records of people who have passed away.

The Voyage: A history game that is a museum about convict voyages

By Jeff Fletcher

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The Voyage is a free online game created by the Australian National Maritime Museum. The game, based on historical records, is about the transportation of convicts from Britain to the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land around 1830. Are you up to the challenge?

The year is 1830. You are the Surgeon Superintendent aboard a convict vessel transporting its human cargo from Britain to the farthest reaches of the known world – Van Diemen’s Land.

You are charged with delivering several hundred convicts to the colony in good health and in the shortest time possible, with minimum loss of life. This is the way to make money and further your reputation and position.

Are you up to the challenge?

Who am I and where am I going?

The Voyage is based on historical records about the transportation of convicts from Britain to the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (modern Tasmania) around 1830.

Traversing the globe by ship in the 1800s was dangerous, sometimes terrifying and often just plain boring!

The ship’s Surgeon Superintendent was responsible for the convicts onboard and had to make decisions constantly. Do we stop for provisions or keep going? How do we improve the mood of the convicts? How do we keep them in good health?

So, in this game you will take their place and your decisions will affect the lives of everyone onboard!

Manage life onboard the ship

There’s a lot to organise before you even leave port! What ships are available? What do I know about the convicts? What’s my budget and what provisions will I need?

Once underway, players oversee many different aspects of the voyage, and a wise player keeps an ever-watchful eye. Pop-up scenarios demand your attention and the challenge is to make the right decision, as whatever you do will affect what happens next.

It’s not all serious, though. Humour is a very important component of The Voyage and breakout games like culling the rats or organising convict dances are fun but they also have a point. If you don’t kill enough rats they can spread disease and eat your food!

Can students learn by playing games?

Games in education have been around for a long time, from board games to electronic games and now online games. Benefits include improving skills in group dynamics; literacy and numeracy; critical thinking; strategy; empathy; collaboration; and engagement with curriculum content.

Well-designed games provide students with a comfortable “buy-in” and give them a stake in the progression through the levels. Learning from mistakes and repetition becomes a challenge rather than a consequence, and both content and skills are delivered through a medium that is relevant in everyday life.

Our trials with both Year 9 and Year 5 also showed that a measure of serendipitous learning — engaging with the unexpected — took place, and this was appealing and stimulating for players.

In his article on  gaming in education , researcher Richard Halverson asks school leaders to look at the “compelling nature of gameplay”. He talks about how core learning structures are built into the design of successful games as inspiration to embrace a different way of learning. This is the inherent challenge for teachers: to explore gaming as a legitimate educational tool that sits comfortably within their teaching framework.

Museums expand their horizons

Today’s  museums are reinventing themselves  to reach more people through multimedia platforms in effective and engaging ways. Digital displays, virtual excursions and online exhibitions couple with existing museum practices to create a broader experience for visitors, both on- and off-site.

My confidence in this project was buoyed by our partnership with ROAR films, the University of Tasmania and Screen Australia and the fact that primary sources — such as Ship Surgeon’s documents from British National archives, convict records from our State archives and  Old Bailey  transcripts — were the foundation of the game.

To me The Voyage is a museum in a game! It utilises primary sources, has a level of interpretation but doesn’t dictate, offers multiple pathways to information and encourages players to explore more for themselves.

We encourage you to take up the challenge!

Play The Voyage and download the teacher notes from the Australia National Maritime Museum.

Jeff Fletcher has been an educator for more than thirty years. He is experienced in specialty museum education and has developed numerous innovative programs K–12 across many curriculum areas. Jeff has a keen interest in bringing the museum’s collection to life in a way that stimulates and engages students through a variety of learning approaches.

First published 6 July 2017, reposted 13 July 2022

Australian classrooms have an opportunity to re-evaluate Cook’s place in history

BTN: Life on 'HMS Endeavour'

Child Convicts of Australia, Ch 1: Transportation and the First Fleet

Life as a Convict in Fremantle Prison: Fenians escape

Convicts and their descendants

Assisted migration to Van Diemen's Land

How to get ahead in Van Diemen's Land

HMB Endeavour, Ch 1: Australia before Endeavour

The Endeavour Journal: Newcomers explore an ancient land

• Free general admission

Convict cargo

1788: Captain Arthur Phillip establishes a convict settlement at Sydney Cove

Port Jackson Harbour, in New South Wales: With a Distant View of the Blue Mountains. Taken from South Head , John Eyre, engraved by Walter Preston, 1812,  ink print on paper, published by Absalom West in Views in New South Wales, 1813. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Captain Arthur Phillip RN was the commander of the First Fleet of 11 ships that sailed into Botany Bay, New South Wales, in January 1788.

Three days later he chose a site at nearby Sydney Cove, in Port Jackson, and on 26 January began to establish a convict settlement.

Phillip proved himself to be an enthusiastic and thorough leader who dealt in commonsense fashion with the challenges he faced in the early years of settlement.

Arthur Phillip to Lord Sydney, 10 July 1788:

Anxious to render a very essential service to my country by the establishment of a colony which, from its situation, must hereafter be a valuable acquisition to Great Britain, no perseverance will be wanting on my part, and which consideration alone would make amends for the being surrounded by the most infamous of mankind. Time will remove all difficulties. As to myself, I am satisfied to remain as long as my services are wanted; I am serving my country, and serving the cause of humanity.

Captain Arthur Phillip , Francis Wheatley, 1786, oil painting. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales ML 124

Enlightened leader

In planning for the voyage, Phillip had displayed an awareness of the potential problems that might come with setting up a colony on the other side of the world.

As governor, he was responsible for nearly 1400 convicts, naval personnel and their dependants. He had complete authority over them, and the right to regulate nearly all aspects of their lives.

Phillip is generally regarded as an enlightened leader for his time, who tried to reform, as well as discipline, his convict charges.

He also sought to establish harmonious relations with the Eora people, the traditional owners of the land in the Sydney area. Local man Bennelong not only acted as an intermediary between Phillip and the Eora, but also seems to have enjoyed a genuine friendship with Phillip.

Phillip took Bennelong and another man, Yemmerrawannie, to London when he returned there in 1792.

From desperation to hope

The fledgling colony faced starvation as the lack of skilled farmers, spoilt seed, poor soils and unfamiliar climate saw the failure of the first crops. Phillip’s humane insistence that convict and free should share alike the reduction of their meagre rations was not universally popular; nor were his gifts of land to deserving convicts.

But both actions ensured the colony’s survival and initiated an egalitarian spirit still prized in Australia today.

Australia’s first governor

Arthur Phillip joined the Royal Navy as a boy in 1751, and served with distinction in the British and Portuguese navies in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. He was appointed the first Governor of New South Wales on 12 October 1786.

Despite the misgivings of some, including the First Lord of the Admiralty, he possessed the ideal qualities for the position of colonial governor: he was accustomed to command, experienced in transporting convicts and familiar with the rudiments of farming.

At Sydney Town, Phillip proved himself to be an enthusiastic and thorough leader who dealt in commonsense fashion with the challenges he faced in the early years of settlement.

Ill-health forced Phillip’s return to England in 1792. He was prevented from returning to Sydney, as he had wished to do, by his illness, and resigned his commission in 1793.

Later, having recovered his health, Phillip returned to the Navy and served in the Napoleonic wars, attaining the rank of admiral. He died at the age of 75 on 31 August 1814.

In July 2014 a plaque was laid in Westminster Abbey to mark the bicentenary of Phillip’s death.

Sketch & Description of the Settlement at Sydney Cove, Port Jackson , Francis Fowkes, 1788. National Library of Australia obj-230578175

First Fleet and Australia's first peoples

The arrival of the First Fleet changed forever the lives of Australia’s first peoples – the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. British settlement brought with it violent conflict, displacement and exile, and devastating diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis.

Phillip took seriously his orders to maintain friendly relations with the Eora, and sought to avoid confrontation. However, within a few years of the fleet’s arrival relations were deteriorating. Phillip himself was speared during a meeting with Eora at Manly in 1790.

Later that year, in December, the warrior Pemulwuy killed Phillip’s gamekeeper, a man with a brutal reputation. Phillip retaliated by ordering punitive expeditions against Pemulwuy and others.

From 1792 Pemulwuy resisted the settlement of his country by leading raids on stations and military camps near the Parramatta, Hawkesbury and Georges rivers. In response, settlers were effectively authorised to shoot Aboriginal people on sight.

Pemulwuy had a number of close escapes, including being shot and severely injured by a party of settlers in 1797, before he was killed on about 1 June 1802.

The fledgling colony

In April 1788, almost three months after the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove, convict Francis Fowkes produced an annotated sketch map of the colony (above). It shows the settlement developing around the Cove and what became known as the Tank Stream.

The map identifies Governor Phillip’s residence and the government farm, which lay to the east of the Tank Stream (at the bottom of the map). The military encampment was on the western side while most of the convict tents were pitched to the north of this in the area later known as The Rocks.

Hopes for a prosperous future

Phillip sent a sample of Sydney clay to Sir Joseph Banks in 1788. Banks passed it to Josiah Wedgwood who made it into commemorative medallions. The design of the medallion, and a poem it inspired by Erasmus Darwin, express an optimistic belief in the colony’s future.

Digital Classroom

Explore free online learning resources about the First Fleet on Australia’s Defining Moments Digital Classroom.

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Further reading

Arthur Phillip, Australian Dictionary of Biography

Arthur Phillip, State Library of New South Wales

Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Australia , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2010.

Derek Parker, Arthur Phillip: Australia's First Governor , Woodslane Press, Sydney, 2012.

Michael Pembroke, Arthur Phillip: Sailor, Mercenary, Governor, Spy , Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne 2013.

The National Museum of Australia acknowledges First Australians and recognises their continuous connection to Country, community and culture.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware this website contains images, voices and names of people who have died.

Journey of the First Fleet

Learning intention.

Students are learning to:

• use images and written sources to investigate the people on board the First Fleet  
• describe people, events and actions related to the First Fleet  
• understand the historical context of the journey and the broader impact on Aboriginal people 

Success criteria

Students will be successful when they can:

• give examples of the experiences of people on board the First Fleet using sources  
• identify the reasons for the First Fleet’s journey and why various groups were passengers 
• explain the concept of terra nullius 

The First Fleet departs

Students interpret the feelings of convicts as they prepare for their voyage to New South Wales. 

All aboard!

Students recreate the journey of the eleven ships of the First Fleet across the ocean to New South Wales. 

Are we there yet?

Students explore the varied convict experiences onboard the ships of the First Fleet. 

Students discover the different forms of ship-to-ship communication employed by the First Fleet. 

Time to play a game

Students test out their knowledge of the journey of the First Fleet by creating a fun board game. 

Eighteen years earlier...

Students examine the contact the British had with New South Wales, prior to the arrival of the First Fleet. 

Change your tune

Students listen to and scrutinise the song Botany Bay, before rewriting the lyrics to reflect our nation’s history. 

NSW Syllabus for the Australian Curriculum History K-10

• Historical skills
• Historical concepts
• Key inquiry question
• Updated Australian curriculum outcomes

HT2-3  describes people, events and actions related to world exploration and its effects 

HT2-4  describes and explains effects of British colonisation in Australia 

HT2-5  applies skills of historical inquiry and communication 

Stories of the First Fleet, including reasons for the journey, who travelled to Australia, and their experiences following arrival  (ACHHK079) 

Students: 

• identify reasons for the voyage of the First Fleet and explain why various groups were passengers 
• describe the establishment of the British colony at Port Jackson 
• using a range of sources, investigate the everyday life of ONE of the following who sailed on the First Fleet and lived in the early colony: a soldier, convict, ex-convict, official 

The nature of contact between Aboriginal people and/or Torres Strait Islanders and others, for example, the Macassans and the Europeans, and the effects of these interactions on, for example, families and the environment (ACHHK080)

• Explain the term terra nullius and describe how this affected the British attitude to aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
• use sources to identify different perspectives on the arrival of the British to Australia 

Comprehension: chronology, terms and concepts:

• respond, read and write, to show understanding of historical matters
• use historical terms

Analysis and use of sources:

• locate relevant information from sources provided 

Perspectives and interpretations:

• identify different points of view within an historical context

 Empathetic understanding:

• explain how and why people in the past may have lived and behaved differently from today
• pose a range of questions about the past
• plan an historical inquiry

Explanation and communication:

• develop texts, particularly narratives
• use a range of communication forms (oral, graphic, written) and digital technologies

Continuity and change : changes and continuities due to British colonisation of Australia.

Cause and effect : reasons for a particular historical development

Perspectives : different points of view within an historical context

Empathetic understanding : how and why people in the past may have lived and behaved differently from today.

Significance : the importance and meaning of national commemorations and celebrations, and the importance of a person or event.

Contestability : historical events or issues may be interpreted differently by historians, eg British 'invasion' or 'settlement' of Australia.

Learning across the curriculum 

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures
• Critical and creative thinking
• Ethical understanding
• Intercultural understanding
• Personal and social capability

Why did Europeans settle in Australia?

Stories of the First Fleet, including reasons for the journey, who travelled to Australia, and their experiences following arrival  (ACHASSK085)

• investigating reasons for the First Fleet journey, including an examination of the wide range of crimes punishable by transportation, and looking at the groups who were transported
• investigating attitudes to the poor, the treatment of prisoners at that time, and the social standing of those who travelled to Australia on the First Fleet, including families, children and convict guards

The nature of contact between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and others, for example, the Macassans and the Europeans, and the effects of these interactions on, for example, people and environments  (ACHASSK086)  

• exploring the impact that British colonisation had on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (dispossession; dislocation; and the loss of lives through conflict, disease, loss of food sources and medicines)

Additional information

The following information supports the above activities. Read the activities first. 

General information about the First Fleet

On 13 May 1787 a fleet of 11 ships set sail from Portsmouth, England under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip. This historic convoy, which later became known as the First Fleet, carried well over 1000 men, women and children to the other side of the globe. Almost half of those on board were convicts sentenced to transportation; the rest were officers, crew and marines and their families. 

The fleet consisted of two Royal Navy escort ships,  HMS Sirius  and  HMS Supply , six convict transports, the  Alexander ,  Charlotte ,  Friendship ,  Lady Penrhyn ,  Prince of Wales  and the  Scarborough , and three store ships, the  Borrowdale ,  Fishburn  and  Golden Grove .  

From Portsmouth the First Fleet travelled via Tenerife and Rio de Janeiro to the Cape of Good Hope, the fleet’s last port of call before striking out for Terra Australis. 

The fleet arrived first in Botany Bay on 18 January. Despite a glowing recommendation from Sir Joseph Banks, it proved unsuitable for a permanent settlement, especially as it lacked a supply of fresh water.  

On 26 January, the fleet made anchorage at Warrane/Sydney Cove in Port Jackson. This site had everything needed for the new colony; deep water close to the shore, shelter and fresh water. Phillip named the bay Sydney Cove, after Lord Sydney the British Home Secretary. It was known as Warrane by the local Gadigal people. 

Activity 1 Information

Information on the drawing - Convicts embarking for Botany Bay, ca. 1790 by Thomas Rowlandson.

The drawing depicts an overcrowded small timber boat holding six convict passengers, and skipper leaning on the tiller. Two convicts are being pushed into the boat by a redcoat soldier whilst another redcoat looks on with rifle in slope position. Similar scenes can be made out in the far background, along with two corpses hanging from a gibbet.

On the back of the framed drawing is pasted some older  printed material , which appears to be either a sale or catalogue description. The exact date of the printed material is unknown although it was after 1827. 

Activity 2 Information

William Bradley’s full drawing shows the First Fleet leaving England on 13 May 1787 accompanied by a twelfth ship, HMS Hyaena , that escorted the fleet for the first 200 miles.  Five of the Hyaena’s crew were ‘lent’ to the Fishburn at the start of the voyage, as some of the original crew were missing, and they decided to stay and go to Botany Bay.

Activity 3 Answers

Q: How could you eat this hard bread without breaking your teeth?

A: You could:

• Let the butter melt into them (if you had enough?)
• Dunk them in your drink (tea, coffee or beer – if you had any?)
• Pound them up into crumbs – to thicken a soup/gruel or use the crumbs like flour
• Suck on them – especially if you didn’t have many teeth! Remember there were no dentists!

Salted meat is meat preserved or cured with salt. Salt inhibits the growth of micro-organisms. First, salt was rubbed into the meat. The meat was soaked in brine (highly salted water) to remove the blood.  After taking it out of the brine, each layer of meat was packed in a barrel with lots of extra salt between each layer. This process was repeated several times. Finally, the barrel was filled with fresh brine and sealed. When it came time to eat, the meat would be rinsed in fresh water and boiled.

Activity 5 Information

More information on the First Fleet convict on board experience can be found in the Convict Women of the First Fleet Learning Activity. An option could be to complete this board game after students have completed both of these learning activities.

Source list for image details in student activities

The first fleet departs.

Image 1: Thomas Rowlandson,  [Convicts embarking for Botany Bay, ca. 1790 / drawing by Thomas Rowlandson],  London: Forgotten Books, 1887

Image 2: Thomas Rowlandson,  [Convicts embarking for Botany Bay, ca. 1790 / drawing by Thomas Rowlandson],  London: Forgotten Books, 1887

Image 3: Thomas Rowlandson,  [Convicts embarking for Botany Bay, ca. 1790 / drawing by Thomas Rowlandson],  London: Forgotten Books, 1887

Image 1: William Bradley,  Opp. p. 13. `Sirius, Supply & Convoy : Needle Point ENE 3 miles. Hyaena in Companny. 13 May 1787', ca. 1802

Related content

Unfurling the first fleet.

A unit of work examining the First Fleet – the journey, arrival, challenges, daily life and interactions with Aboriginal people.

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The History Hit Miscellany of Facts, Figures and Fascinating Finds

• Revolutions

When Did the First Fleet Arrive in Australia?

History Hit

25 jan 2021.

On 26 January 1788 a settlement was founded in Sydney Cove. It subsequently became the capital of the British colony of New South Wales . With fresh water and a gainful location on Australia ‘s east coast, British governor Arthur Phillip enthusiastically proclaimed that it was “without exception the finest harbour in the world.”

Its settlers were the officers, sailors and over 700 convicts of the First Fleet, a group of 11 ships that had set sail 250 days earlier from Portsmouth, England , over 15,000 miles away. The First Fleet was constituted by six convict transports, three store ships and two Navy vessels. On arriving in New South Wales, territory then inhabited by Aboriginal Australian groups, they founded a penal colony and initiated the European colonisation of Australia.

By the early 20th century, the First Fleet’s arrival was officially commemorated as “Australia Day”. Since the 1938 Day of Mourning protest, counter-observances have been held on the same day to recognise prejudice and discrimination against Indigenous Australians.

Charting Botany Bay

The area around Sydney Cove had first been charted on Europeans maps 18 years earlier by English explorer Captain James Cook . Cook surveyed land inhabited by clans of the Eora people, and what became the southern suburbs of Sydney.

Official portrait of Captain James Cook (cropped). Image credit: Nathaniel Dance-Holland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

He was so impressed by the region’s variety of flora and fauna that he gave it the name Botany Bay. He returned to London highly recommending the location at the place to start a settlement. In a period of increasing competition between imperial powers in Europe, and particularly after Britain’s loss of its American colonies , the prospect of colonising Australia was seized upon by the British government.

Central to the government’s objectives was the establishment of a penal colony where criminals could be transported beyond Britain’s overcrowded jails. Consequently, six of the boats in the First Fleet were convict transports.

Setting sail

In May 1787, the 11 ships of the First Fleet left England. The first stage of the journey, from Portsmouth to Tenerife, was pleasant enough: both crew and passengers were allowed to sun themselves on deck. The turn southwards towards Rio de Janiero, however, introduced new hardships.

Torrential tropical rains prevented access to the decks. Weeks without favourable winds left the passengers, particularly the convicts, stuck below decks in sordid conditions with diminishing supplies of water.

Several died during these weeks. A month-long stop in Rio from August brought respite and supplies before the fleet set sail on a course to the east. At the Dutch colony of Cape Town, the ships left the last European settlement of their journey. The fleet faced difficult conditions in the violent seas below the 40th parallel, where they encountered the strong westerly winds known as the “Roaring Forties”.

A land down under

Van Diemen’s Land was sighted by the ship Friendship on 4 January 1788. As the ships crawled along the eastern coast of Australia, the crews were beset by freak storms that tested their endurance. Nonetheless they reached Botany Bay on 19 January 1788 without having lost a single ship. Of the 1,500 people who had set off, 48 had died during the voyage.

The settlers discovered that Botany Bay did not quite live up to Cook’s glowing description. The water was too shallow, the soil too poor and the fresh water limited. Neither did they receive an excessively warm welcome from the Aboriginal Australians who already lived there.

Meanwhile, the colony was exposed to attack and poor discipline among the marines perturbed the expedition’s commander, Captain Arthur Phillip.

‘Founding of the settlement of Port Jackson at Botany Bay in New South Wales in 1788’ by Thomas Gosse (cropped). Image credit: Gosse, Thomas, 1765-1844, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Phillip had been authorised to establish a colony elsewhere if necessary. As a result, Philip and a few companions travelled in three small boats to a better site 12 kilometres north. With sheltered anchorages, fresh water and fertile soil, Port Jackson — a place named but hardly noticed by Cook — proved much more suitable.

Philip later wrote of “the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand ship of the line may ride in the most perfect security.”

Settlement of Sydney

Over the next few days in January 1788, the convicts and settlers were moved to Port Jackson. The site was renamed Sydney Cove, after the then-British Home Secretary Lord Sydney. On 26 January, Philip and officers from the ship Supply planted the British flag and New South Wales was proclaimed a British colony.

The settlers’ struggles did not end there, and nor did those of the Indigenous Australians whom they would engage in sporadic conflict with until 1810. The settlement of Sydney grew and was unrecognisable by the time the last “first-fleeter,” a female convict from Manchester called Betty King, died in 1856.

Captain Arthur Phillip raising the British flag at Sydney Cove, 26 January 1788. Oil sketch by Algernon Talmage, 1937. Image credit: Algernon Talmage, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What is Australia Day?

By the early 19th century, residents of the colony alluded to the date of the First Fleet’s arrival in Sydney as a special occasion, and the first official celebration took place in 1818.

By the end of the century, most colonial capitals in Australia celebrated the anniversary, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that 26 January was being widely celebrated as “Australia Day”.

Invasion Day

26 January 1938 marked the 150th anniversary of British settlement in Australia. It was also the first year that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people publicly protested the brutality of colonisation and the dispossession of Indigenous land.

Purposefully coinciding with Australia Day celebrations, the 1938 Day of Mourning protest rejected reverential treatment of European settlers for demands that Aboriginal Australians achieve “full citizen status and equality within the community”, which they did not possess.

Day of Mourning protests and commemorations have been held in Australia since 1938.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware this website contains images, voices and names of people who have died.

Exile or opportunity?

1788: Captain Arthur Phillip establishes a convict settlement at Sydney Cove

Colonial Australia

Indigenous Australia

Learning area

Use the following additional activities and discussion questions to encourage students (in small groups or as a whole class) to think more deeply about this defining moment.

Questions for discussion

1. What, if any, have been the long-term effects of convict transportation on Australian society?

2. Do you agree with the National Museum of Australia that the arrival of the First Fleet is a defining moment in Australian history? Explain your answer.

Image activities

1. Look carefully at all the images for this defining moment. Tell this story in pictures by placing them in whatever order you think works best. Write a short caption under each image.

2. Which 3 images do you think are the most important for telling this story? Why?

3. If you could pick only one image to represent this story, which one would you choose? Why?

Finding out more

1. What else would you like to know about this defining moment? Write a list of questions and then share these with your classmates. As a group, create a final list of 3 questions and conduct some research to find the answers.

In a snapshot

The arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in January of 1788 marked the beginning of the European colonisation of Australia. The fleet was made up of 11 ships carrying convicts from Britain to Australia. Their arrival changed forever the lives of the Eora people, the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land in the Sydney area, and began waves of convict transportation that lasted until 1868.

‘Sketch & description of the settlement at Sydney Cove Port Jackson in the County of Cumberland.’ Drawn by Francis Fowkes.

National Library of Australia, MAP NK 276

Can you find out?

1. Who were Australia’s first convicts? Why were they transported to Australia?

2. How did Governor Arthur Phillip manage the colony of New South Wales?

3. What were the main ways Aboriginal people were affected by the arrival of Phillip and the First Fleet?

Colour publication printed for the 150th Anniversary Celebrations of Australia, 1938. Captain Arthur Phillip is featured.

National Museum of Australia

Why was a convict colony set up in Australia?

Britain used transportation to distant lands as a way of getting rid of prisoners. After Britain lost its American colonies in 1783 the jails of England were full. The British decided to begin transporting prisoners to Australia, which had recently been claimed for the British Crown by Lieutenant James Cook. 

Prisoners (also known as convicts) were transported for many reasons but mainly for crimes that we might consider to be minor today, such as stealing. Convicts who were transported were usually poor, often from the large industrial cities and were mostly from England (with a large minority from Ireland and Scotland).

The First Fleet of 11 ships, commanded by Captain Arthur Phillip, set up a convict settlement at Sydney Cove (now Circular Quay) on 26 January 1788. This was the beginning of convict settlement in Australia.

A colour engraving of a family of four travelling in the Port Jackson area

Who was Australia’s first governor?

Captain Arthur Phillip was an experienced naval officer who became first governor of the colony of New South Wales. He faced many challenges in the early years of settlement. He was prepared to punish people who broke the rules, but also rewarded convicts and free settlers who behaved well.

Almost straight away, the new colony faced starvation. The first crops failed because of the lack of skilled farmers, spoilt seed brought from England, poor local soils, an unfamiliar climate and bad tools. Phillip insisted that food be shared between convicts and free settlers. The British Officers didn’t like this, nor the fact that Phillip gave land to trustworthy convicts. But both actions meant that the colony survived, and they began an attitude of fairness that is still prized in Australia today.

Research task

Research the sorts of people who travelled on the 11 ships that made up the First Fleet. How many convicts (male and female), free settlers, crew, marines, officials and children were on board?

‘A Family of New South Wales’, based on a sketch by Captain Philip Gidley King, 1793

What effect did the First Fleet have on Australia’s first peoples?

The arrival of the First Fleet immediately affected the Eora nation, the traditional Aboriginal owners of the Sydney area. Violence between settlers and the Eora people started as soon as the colony was set up. The Eora people, particularly the warrior Pemulwuy, fought the colonisers. This conflict was mainly over land and food.

Phillip was speared during a meeting with Eora at Manly in 1790, but he recovered and continued as the colony’s first governor for two more years. He returned to England in 1792 with two Indigenous men: Bennelong, who later returned to Australia, and Yemmerrawannie, who died in England.

Thousands of Eora people died as a result of European diseases like smallpox.

The founding of Australia by Capt. Arthur Phillip R.N. Sydney Cove, Jan. 26th 1788 , by Algernon Talmage, 1937

This map attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of Aboriginal Australia. It shows only the general locations of larger groupings of people which may include clans, dialects or individual languages in a group. It used published resources from 1988-1994 and is not intended to be exact, nor the boundaries fixed. It is not suitable for native title or other land claims.

The First Fleet entering Port Jackson, January 26, 1788 , by E Le Bihan, drawn in 1888

Captain Arthur Phillip, painted by Francis Wheatley

Port Jackson Harbour , by John Eyre and engraved by Walter Preston, 1812

Convict leg irons

An engraving believed to be the only known depiction of Pemulwuy

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, FL3141725

David R Horton (creator), AIATSIS, 1996. No reproduction without permission. To purchase a print version visit: www.aiatsis.ashop.com.au/

State Library of New South Wales FL3268277

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales a928087

Convict love token, 1792

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

State Library of New South Wales Q80/18

What were the long-term effects of the First Fleet?

The First Fleet was the beginning of convict transportation to Australia and was followed by many other fleets of convict ships. When this ended in 1868, over 150,000 convicts had been transported to New South Wales and other Australian colonies. Most convicts stayed in Australia after serving their sentences, and some became well-known, important people within the Australian colonies.

Convict settlement continued to have devastating effects on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the decades after 1788. Thousands died in conflicts with settlers and from diseases, and many more suffered from the loss of cultural traditions and languages.

Read a longer version of this Defining Moment on the National Museum of Australia’s website . 

What did you learn?

Related resources, australian journey episode 06: captivity narratives, 1.2 convicts sent to australia: ‘when prisoners walked the land’, convict punishment, collection highlights: convict love tokens.

Convict transportation peaks

Convict transportation ends

Princess Cruises ships from newest to oldest — a complete list

What is the newest Princess Cruises ship? If you're in the market for a Princess cruise, it's something worth knowing.

The newest Princess cruise ship is typically also the Princess ship with the most up-to-date restaurants, bars, attractions and cabins. It's the one to choose if you want the very latest and greatest in a vessel for your Princess cruise vacation.

As of this year, the newest Princess cruise ship is Sun Princess — the first of a new class of vessels for the line. It just sailed on its maiden voyage in February.

For more cruise guides, news and tips, sign up for TPG's cruise newsletter .

Other relatively new Princess ships include Discovery Princess, Enchanted Princess, Sky Princess and Majestic Princess. All began sailing in the last seven years.

In all, Princess Cruises operates 16 vessels. On average, the line comes out with one new ship every two years or so, and it typically keeps vessels in its fleet for around 20 to 30 years before retiring them. The oldest Princess Cruises ship, Grand Princess, is 26 years old.

In general, Princess Cruises' newest ships are bigger and more venue-packed than its older ships. If you crave a lot of options for restaurants, bars and pool areas for your Princess cruise vacation, you'll want to stick to vessels built in the last 10 or so years.

Related: The 4 types of Princess Cruises ships, explained

The oldest Princess cruise ships — those built in the late 1990s and early 2000s — can be as much as 30% smaller than the line's newest vessels.

Here, every Princess ship currently in operation is ranked from newest to oldest:

1. Sun Princess

Maiden voyage: 2024 Size: 177,882 gross tons Passenger capacity: 4,300

2. Discovery Princess

Maiden voyage: 2022 Size: 145,000 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,660

3. Enchanted Princess

Maiden voyage: 2020 Size: 144,650 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,660

4. Sky Princess

Maiden voyage: 2019 Size: 144,650 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,660

5. Majestic Princess

Maiden voyage: 2017 Size: 143,700 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,560

6. Regal Princess

Maiden voyage: 2014 Size: 142,229 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,560

7. Royal Princess

Maiden voyage: 2013 Size: 142,229 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,560

8. Ruby Princess

Maiden voyage: 2008 Size: 113,561 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,080

9. Emerald Princess

Maiden voyage: 2007 Size: 113,561 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,080

10. Crown Princess

Maiden voyage: 2006 Size: 113,561 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,080

11. Caribbean Princess

Maiden voyage: 2004 Size: 112,894 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,149

12. Sapphire Princess

Maiden voyage: 2004 Size: 115,875 gross tons Passenger capacity : 2,670

13. Diamond Princess

14. Island Princess

Maiden voyage: 2003 Size: 92,822 gross tons Passenger capacity : 2,200

15. Coral Princess

Maiden voyage: 2002 Size: 91,627 gross tons Passenger capacity : 2,000

16. Grand Princess

Maiden voyage: 1998 Size: 107,517 gross tons Passenger capacity : 2,600

What is the newest Princess cruise ship?

The newest Princess cruise ship is Sun Princess. As noted above, it just debuted in February.

Measuring 177,882 gross tons, Sun Princess is the biggest Princess cruise ship ever built and has more restaurants, bars, showrooms and deck-top pool space than any other Princess ship.

Sun Princess is the first vessel in Princess Cruises' new Sphere Class of ships and considerably bigger than the vessels in the line's last new series of ships, the Royal Class. A second ship in the Sphere Class series, Star Princess , is under construction and will debut in October 2025.

For more details on Sun Princess, including what venues are on board and what it's like to sail on the vessel, see TPG's comprehensive first look at Sun Princess after an early sailing.

What is the oldest Princess cruise ship?

The oldest Princess cruise ship is Grand Princess. Unveiled way back in 1998, it's the namesake vessel for the line's Grand Class of vessels, which remain at the core of the Princess fleet.

There are seven Grand Class vessels in the Princess fleet in all, making it the biggest grouping of ships at the line. Unveiled between 1998 and 2008, the Grand Class vessels are smaller than the Sphere Class and Royal Class vessels at around 107,000 to 116,000 tons in size. This smaller size allows them to operate a wider range of itineraries than the Sphere Class and Royal Class ships, as the vessels can access some smaller ports that aren't as accessible to the bigger ships.

Related: The ultimate guide to Princess Cruises

Still, the Grand Class vessels are big enough to offer a lot of onboard venues. The Grand Class ships carry between 2,600 to 3,100 passengers at double occupancy.

What new Princess cruise ships are coming?

Princess currently has one new cruise ship on order: Star Princess. As noted above, it's the second vessel in Princess' new Sphere Class series of ships, which for now will be made up of just two ships (Princess could order more Sphere Class ships in coming years — we'll see).

As noted above, Star Princess is scheduled to debut in October 2025. The ship was scheduled to debut earlier in 2025 but recently was delayed by several months due to construction issues.

The Sphere Class vessels are being built at the Fincantieri shipyard near Monfalcone, Italy.

What is the newest Princess cruise ship available for booking?

Star Princess is the newest Princess cruise ship you can book right now. While the vessel isn't yet in operation, its initial sailings scheduled for October 2025 already are on sale, as are future voyages through March 2026.

What is the newest class of Princess cruise ships?

The Sphere Class is the newest class of Princess ships. It'll be made up of at least two vessels, the first of which (Sun Princess) is already sailing.

At 177,882 tons, Sun Princess is about 22% bigger than the previous biggest ships in the Princess fleet — a significant jump in size for the line. And yet, while it's 22% bigger, it's designed to hold just 17% more passengers.

In other words, its space-to-passenger ratio is greater, making the ship feel roomier — if only modestly.

Related: Everything to know about Princess cabins and suites

In addition to being significantly bigger than past Princess ships, Sun Princess is also the first Princess ship with suites that come with exclusive access to a private restaurant, lounge and sun deck — a sign Princess hopes to draw more upmarket travelers.

In all, the vessel is designed to hold 4,300 passengers at double occupancy.

What's the difference between newer and older Princess ships?

Newer Princess ships generally are bigger than older Princess ships and thus have more and bigger onboard venues than the line's older vessels.

On the newest Princess cruise ships, the Sphere Class and Royal Class vessels, for instance, you'll find the largest piazza-like central atriums in the Princess fleet surrounded by lots of bars and restaurants; multiple entertainment venues for live shows, comedy acts and more; and expansive pool decks with more space for sunning than you'll find on smaller Princess vessels.

You'll also find some only-on-the-Royal-class-ships extras, including, on some of the Royal Class ships, a glass-floored "SeaWalk" that extends over the side of the vessel.

Related: The 5 best destinations you can visit on a Princess ship

Princess' oldest cruise ships are significantly smaller than its newest ships and lack some of the above features. They have a more intimate feel, at least in the pantheon of relatively big, mass-market ships, and they hold fewer people. While Sphere Class and Royal Class ships can hold more than 4,500 passengers with every berth full, the line's oldest vessels (particularly the relatively small Island Princess and Coral Princess) often sail with just 2,000 or so passengers on board.

That makes them a good choice for someone who wants to try Princess Cruises but isn't eager to travel with huge crowds. The oldest ships in the Princess fleet thus appeal to a subset of Princess fans who prefer more intimacy in a cruise vessel and don't mind giving up some onboard amenities to get it. They are also often less expensive to sail on, on a per-day basis.

Related: Don't miss out on these Princess loyalty perks

In addition, because of their size, the oldest ships at Princess Cruises are able to operate itineraries to places that aren't as easy for big ships to visit. Not all ports in the world can handle a ship the size of Sun Princess.

Note that all Princess Cruises ships are renovated and upgraded on a regular schedule every few years, so even the oldest Princess vessels have newer carpeting, updated furniture, modern decor in cabins and other updates. In many cases, they also have had entire eateries and bars renovated over the years with concepts that first debuted on newer vessels.

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• 21 tips and tricks that will make your first cruise go smoothly
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• Cruise packing list: The ultimate guide to what to pack for a cruise

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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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.

Explore the May 2024 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

“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.

May 22 , 2024

End Game Loop

Fleet management, ship upgrades, manufactory defense.

During Season 1, you've been introduced to the Helm and many of you already have the foundation of your Empire well on its way.

A first peek into the Season 2 End Game improvements

Season 2 will introduce changes and improvements to Skull and Bones in general, but we want to give you a sneak peek into some of the additions coming to the End Game.

The tools to build your Empire, which you are probably well-versed in by now, include quite a few aspects of the game.

Throughout the seasons, we want to encourage you to take advantage of the mechanics and skills you learned during your rise to Kingpin. Use your experience and your wits to create an Empire that will be able to survive the waves of unexpected events, opportunities, and threats that will challenge your position as Kingpin within the world of Skull and Bones.

We want to improve the way you operate your Empire, creating more ways for you to build it, and giving you more freedom. With that objective in mind, we've re-adjusted the cost of running Manufactories, to be more accessible and allow you to spend more time enjoying the content planned with Season 2. We will also bring the ability to fast travel when you carry Pieces of Eight, so long are you are not currently participating in a Helm Wager. We intend, as well, to make your life as Kingpin easier, by adding with this new season the first steps toward automating some of the repeatable actions of the Endgame loop, making more relevant the ships in your fleet, and encouraging you to build more.

The World is changing

You can expect that the world state of Skull and Bones will keep on evolving Season after Season and the Helm will do so as well. The world, as you've known it during Season 1, will change with the arrival of the Hubac Twins and the Chorus Fleet.

The Hubac Twins are threatening all the smuggling operations in the Indian Ocean. It means that the Helm will change the way they provide their services to keep up with the world state. You will need to fulfil different requirements when expanding & maintaining your operations.

The threat of the Twins and the Compagnie Royale is very real and making a tangible impact on the local scene. Owning Manufactories will become more challenging and taking them over will require you to prove yourself a lot more to those around you. Though it's only a temporary setback as you know you'll be able to take advantage of and upgrade the services provided by the Helm.

Some of the upgrades available to you will change, new services will appear, and some will see their pricing revisited.

What contraband the factions could provide will become more challenging to produce and increase in worth, or as some are in demand - be it by the Compagnie Royale or otherwise - their price will decrease. Owning the right Manufactory will be paramount to the increase of your wealth.

It'll be up to you to explore the possibilities and manage your Empire to turn them into an opportunity in spite of the Hubac Twin's threat.

You have strived and fought to build your own fleet and soon it'll be in your grasp.

From Season 2 onward, you will have access to Fleet Management which will allow you to automate the collection of Pieces of Eight from your manufactories.

This is the first iteration of the feature, and, with future seasons, we plan to add more functionalities and expand on what your fleet can bring for you and your Empire.

The basics of the mechanic are as follow:

• Once your Manufactory is level 4, you'll gain access to the feature.
• When opening the menu of the Manufactory you want to assign a ship to, you will have access to another tab that will allow you to select one of your current ships and assign it to the Manufactory.
• Once assigned, and so long as a Manufactory is funded, the ship will make the voyage.
• Depending on your ship's level and the distance from the Manufactory, you will be provided with a risk level from low to very high for each Manufactory you assign a ship to. So, choose wisely as with greater risk comes a higher chance of some of your Pieces of Eight being plundered by Rogues and your ship being damaged.

You can currently assign one ship to one Manufactory. The ship, every time its cargo hold is full, will carry on - whether you are online or offline - travelling between the Manufactory and the Den. It will do so, so long as the Manufactory has silver funding it, the ship is assigned to it and not in needs of repairs.

It does mean that while the ship is assigned, it is not available to use for other activities.

You can unassign a ship at any point. A ship remains docked until the maximum amount of Pieces of Eight it can carry is reached, so if you unassign it while it's docked, you'll be able to use your ship instantly. On the other hand, if you unassign it while it is doing a delivery it'll finish delivering the Pieces of Eight it carries to the closest Den before becoming available to use. To make sure you unassign it at an optimal time, you can check on its status within the Manufactory menu but also directly via the status icon on the map.

As stated above, Fleet Management will see additional improvements with time and we're keen to hear your thoughts and suggestions on the topic.

In addition to the improvements we brought to the ships during Season 1, we're bringing with this new season the ability to upgrade your ship. It'll allow you to improve your ship stats and gain new perks and will be unlocked once you reach the rank of Kingpin.

Building on the system already in place, we aim to make the ships you've built as you progress more relevant and diversify your possibilities when putting together a loadout. We intend to make playstyles more relevant, increasing your ship level while taking full advantage of unique aspects of smaller ships you already own - allowing you to tackle tougher content with them.

To start on an upgrade, you will need a visit to the shipwright, some materials, and silver or Pieces of Eight.

Within the Shipwright menu, you will have the option to Upgrade Ships. Each ship which is in your fleet will have 6 upgrade levels. For each upgrade level you will need different resources depending on which ship you choose.

The upgrades will grant improvements to ships stats such as hull, health, speed, cargo space but will also affect your furniture slot and add a new perk depending on the ship selected and the upgrade level.

As you increase in level, the materials and currency you'll need to upgrade will differ, becoming a little more difficult to get your hands on.

Another addition we're bringing with Season 2 is the ability to use Helm Leases. Helm Leases are exclusive certificates offered by the Helm that allow you to claim ownership of a Manufactory of your choice. We intend, with this new feature, to provide you with a greater degree of influence when shaping your empire. We want to encourage a strategic approach to how you use the Manufactories and the contraband they produce for you.

During Season 1, some contraband items were available in a specific region, we're now balancing how some of the contraband is available on the map. With Season 2, we're aiming to encourage your relations with factions. Each faction will have contraband items they specialise in producing.

As it's a new season, and with it will come new enemies, the dynamics of the regions and their factions will evolve. Some items might be harder to come by, driving the price up, while others will see their price lowered as the market gets flooded. You can expect with every season that products' demand and availability will evolve.

It'll be up to you to monitor the supply and demand, seizing what's coming and turning it into an opportunity. For that purpose, the Helm Leases will play a major role in helping you to make meaningful investments in your Smuggling Empire. There are multiple ways to obtain Helm Leases, but to name a few, you can obtain some via the Smuggler Pass, through seasonal contracts or even by trading contraband with Scurlock and Rahma.

Once you obtain a Lease, you can claim it by navigating to the Manufactory of your choice and interacting with it.

There will be a 'Redeem Helm Lease' button. When selecting your Manufactory, have a look at your Helm map, it should give you insights on what contraband items each of them produces.

There are different types of Leases - factional, regional, or worldwide Lease.

• Factional Lease: this type of Lease allows you to acquire a Manufactory from a specific faction.
• Regional: it allows you to claim any Manufactory within a specific region.
• Worldwide: Valid in the whole Indian Ocean, you can choose to acquire any Manufactory within the world of Skull and Bones.

So it's worth checking the validity of the Lease before attempting to claim a manufactory. To use any of the Leases, you will need to have the region unlocked, otherwise the menu will not appear. Luckily, for those of you who have unlocked the regions within your Empire during Season 1, those will remain available to you.

Once you have obtained a Lease, it'll remain in your possession until you make use of it, be it this season or the next.

They cannot be crafted, jettisoned nor traded and each Lease lasts through the season once redeemed, so make your choices wisely.

New Game Modes

Up till now, you could obtain Manufactories via Hostile Takeovers and Legendary Heists. We're now adding another option tailored more toward solo players, called Buyout. Through the map, locate corrupt officials and bribe your way into controlling a Manufactory.

A buyout will appear at random outposts on the map at regular intervals. Anyone can join; you will not be competing with one another during the event.

Before entering the event, you will be able to see the potential reward but not the items necessary to secure the deal. Once you agree to enter the event, you will need to travel to the outpost where the Overseas Smuggler is located and until the countdown timer runs out, you will not see which items are requested.

It is once the countdown timer is up that the items necessary to secure the deal are revealed. The items requested can be commodities, contraband, currencies, materials (refined or raw), or equipment.

You will need to gather the items requested and submit them to the Overseas Smuggler during the time limit given. If you are successful, you will be awarded the Manufactory.

You'll need to be fast to secure a deal before the opportunity ends. These officials are greedy and will not make it easy for you.

Buyout is not the only mode we're bringing to the game with the new season. This new mode called Manufactory Defense is also a solo PvE event.

While a Manufactory is under your supervision, it can come under threat. As you expand your grasp on the Indian Ocean, many will notice your growing influence and will stop at nothing to cripple your smuggling Empire. Faction ships will try to seize your Manufactories, and it's up to you to safeguard your Helm operations.  When you are offline, your Manufactory cannot be attacked, but do expect, when you are online, that a percentage of Manufactory will come to need some defending every few hours.

Once a Defense pop up, you can choose to refuse or accept it. Upon accepting a Manufactory Defense, you will need to travel to the Manufactory under threat and defend it from the waves of enemies.

You will face a total of 4 waves of enemies, getting progressively more challenging. As each faction has their patterns of attack, you might want to adapt your ship loadout to optimise the damage you can inflict and defend against, based on their strength and weaknesses.

If you manage to take down all the enemies without your Manufactory's HP reaching 0, you will have successfully defended your Manufactory. You would then be rewarded Helm materials. The rewards differ depending on if your Manufactory was funded or not when you finish the Defense.

If your Manufactory is funded when receiving the rewards, you will receive a Manufactory boost, 5000 Silver & a Gold Raider's Cache.

If your Manufactory is not funded when receiving the rewards, you will receive 8000 Silver and a Gold raider's Cache.

On the other hand, if you fail to defend your Manufactory or do not come to its defense, it will suffer significant damage and will need time to repair itself. A damaged Manufactory will not be able to generate Pieces of Eight while it is under repair. It'll also remain "in repairs" for an increased amount of time as your Manufactory level increases.

All those changes will be introduced with season 2, but it is only one of the steps toward the smuggling Empire we're hoping to help you build with time. Our teams will keep on iterating Skull and Bones to bring to you a continuously improving experience in-game as time goes by.

You can keep up to date with the latest news of Skull and Bones by following us on TWITTER , FACEBOOK ,  INSTAGRAM ,  REDDIT and/or   UBISOFT DISCORD .

Recommended Content

Watch the latest trailer

‘Queen Charlotte’: The True History of the King & Queen’s Children

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Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.

The Big Picture

• Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story mixes fictional storytelling with historical accuracy, depicting the queen's children and a succession crisis for the royal family.
• Many of Queen Charlotte's children had scandalous lives, having illegitimate children rather than heirs.
• The succession crisis was resolved when Queen Victoria, Queen Charlotte's granddaughter through her fifth-oldest child, was born and later, ruled for a record-breaking 64 years.

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is very much an alternative history, where real-life royals are fictionalized and embellished to create a compelling storyline. Historical figures and events have been remodeled to fit the narrative rather than give a history lesson. This spin-off builds on Bridgerton 's appeal as a show full of romantic intrigue and high society scandal. Golda Rosheuvel reprises her role as Queen Charlotte in the 1814 plot, while India Ria Amarteifio perfectly depicts her younger self. Moving back and forth between Bridgerton’ s present day and the Queen’s marital past , the show tells the story of the tumultuous early experiences of marriage between Charlotte and King George III (played by Corey Mylchreest ). As in real life, the king is shown to be suffering from a steady decline in his mental stability, which has caused history to label him as a “mad king ."

This, and many other elements of the show, represent a degree of historical accuracy . One point of interest is that Queen Charlotte depicts the couple’s 15 children in the present-day scenes, where it is made clear that a succession crisis has arisen due to the absence of a legitimate heir. Factual accuracy varies when it comes to how the children of Charlotte and George III are depicted, where grains of historical truth have been smoothly tied into this decidedly fictional retelling. Notably, three of the couple's 15 children died young . Two did not survive infancy, whilst their final child, Princess Amelia, succumbed to ill health at the age of 27. This is not touched upon in the show, where the focus is on the Queen’s eldest and better-known offspring.

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story

Betrothed against her will to King George, young Charlotte arrives in London on her wedding day and faces scrutiny from the monarch's cunning mother.

Births, Deaths & A Succession Crisis For Queen Charlotte's Family

One of the key moments in the show's first episode is the revelation that the queen's grandchild and only legitimate heir has died in childbirth along with her newborn son. This is a factually accurate moment, referencing the death of Princess Charlotte of Wales , who passed away in 1817 after giving birth to a stillborn boy. However, with the series set in 1814, the date is changed. Princess Charlotte was the daughter of the queen's oldest son, George, who would later become King George IV ( Ryan Gage ). This tragedy triggered a succession crisis in the show and in real life, where the royal family was suddenly without a legitimate heir to the throne. Though Charlotte secured her place as queen with so many children, it seemed the royal line would end with the next generation.

There was no direct heir to the throne until as late as 1819; the queen's sons had fathered numerous offspring, but none by their wives. In the show, the queen laments that her daughters are unmarried, and her sons have only produced children out of wedlock. While her sons did have many illegitimate children, it is not the case that the queen was eager for her daughters to marry. On the contrary, it was a fact that the king and queen were not keen for their daughters to find husbands . The daughters had largely secluded upbringings until they were presented with opportunities to find spouses. It is thought that the queen preferred to keep her children with her for their company, especially as the king's health declined. Conversely, in the show, she chastises them for being spinsters.

The show also implies that many of the queen's daughters remained spinsters, but several led just as scandalous lives as their brothers. Princess Sophia ( Eliza Capel ), for example, was thought to be romantically involved with the king's chief equerry, Major-General Thomas Garth, who was more than 30 years her senior. There are even rumors that she gave birth in secret to Garth's illegitimate child. However, Princess Elizabeth ( Sabina Arthur ) was married to Prince Frederick of Hesse-Homburg, as she brings up in the series. Yet this didn't happen until she was 47, and she remained childless throughout her life. Queen Charlotte brings up miscarriages when Elizabeth and her brother confront their mother about the pressure she is putting on them and their siblings, which is not out of the realm of possibility, but the show adds the detail to demonstrate the harshness of the "baby race." Several of Charlotte's daughters were rumored to be involved in scandals, which is not shown in the series, forcing them to lose some of their individuality for the sake of effective storytelling. Their real lives were a lot more complex than viewers have been led to believe.

'Queen Charlotte' Explores the Rumors, Scandal & Dozens of Illegitimate Children

The queen's oldest son, George, became the Prince Regent in 1811 when his father's health irretrievably worsened. He eventually became King George IV upon his father's death in 1820. Queen Charlotte includes the reality of his Regency, as his brothers expositionally explain as they try to use him to block the marriages Charlotte arranges. As the acting head of the country and the family, he must approve any marriage, and despite the urges of his brothers, he follows his mother's orders and forces them to marry. In the show, George is given a somewhat sympathetic characterization as a parent grieving for his daughter, where he is shown absentmindedly acting in accordance with the queen's wishes. In contrast, the public generally perceived the real George IV negatively for his lavish spending habits and continual extramarital relationships.

A key episode of the show features a conversation between Queen Charlotte, Lady Danbury ( Adjoa Andoh ), and Lady Bridgerton ( Ruth Gemmell ) , where Charlotte laments the misfortune that her sons are in love with actresses and Catholics and that they have numerous children by these women instead of by their wives. This is a truthful representation of the case where George IV was known for his affair with actress and poet Mary Robinson and had a long-term relationship with the devout Catholic Maria Fitzherbert. The pair actually married in a secret wedding, which was later deemed invalid by the king. George was eventually married to his cousin Caroline in 1795, but there was little love between them, and they had no surviving children besides the ill-fated Princess Charlotte. The show acknowledges that illegitimate children exist throughout Charlotte's conversations with her sons, but the fact is brushed aside as Charlotte sets her sights on a legitimate grandchild.

Additionally, the show depicts the queen’s third-oldest son, William (Seamus Dillane) , being encouraged to marry so that he could sire a legitimate heir. He was convinced to marry Princess Adelaide in 1818 but had no surviving children. Prior to this, William had a long relationship with comic actress Dorothea Jordan, with whom he is thought to have fathered 10 illegitimate children. William later became King William IV after his brother’s death in 1830, and he held the crown until his death in 1837.

Queen Charlotte Gets an Heir At Long Last

The pressure to produce an heir depicted in Queen Charlotte really did prompt William's marriage to Princess Adelaide. The succession crisis continued until the queen's fifth-oldest child, Edward ( Jack Michael Stacey ), had a daughter who would later become Queen Victoria . In the show's finale episode, the queen is shown to be comforted by the news of a female heir and remarks that the country will benefit from having a strong queen. Though Charlotte's reaction to the news of her granddaughter can only be speculation, this statement is proven true. It is widely believed that Queen Victoria repaired the damage done to the monarchy's reputation during the reigns of her uncles. She ruled for almost 64 years, longer than any of her predecessors. However, there is one major difference. Like several elements in this plot, the date is changed for the story. While Queen Victoria was born in 1819, the announcement of her impending birth in Queen Charlotte takes place in 1814, putting her birth a few years earlier than in reality. However, this small change allows the series to conclude the plot.

The Queen Charlotte spin-off ultimately combines a fictional fantasy world with moments of authentic royal history . In the case of the King and Queen's many children, the true history seems even more tumultuous and complex than the fictional adaptation. With most of the story spent in 1761 as it recounts Charlotte and George's marriage, there is only so much time to explore their children, and with so many of them, it's difficult to distinguish them in the allotted time, so it's no wonder their stories are simplified or left out. However, the royal family's storyline is one area in which Queen Charlotte demonstrates its historical inspiration.

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is available to stream on Netflix.

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System Requirements

• Processor: I5 - 10400
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: RTX 1060
• Storage: 2 GB available space
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: RTX 2060
• Storage: 4 GB available space

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Watch CBS News

Legendary U.S. World War II submarine located 3,000 feet underwater off the Philippines

By Stephen Smith

Updated on: May 24, 2024 / 3:33 PM EDT / CBS News

The final resting place of an iconic U.S. Navy submarine that was sunk 80 years ago during World War II was located 3,000 feet below the ocean's surface, the Naval History and Heritage Command said Thursday.

The USS Harder – which earned the nickname "Hit 'em HARDER" – was found off the Philippine island of Luzon, sitting upright and "relatively intact" except for damage behind its conning tower from a Japanese depth charge, the command said . The sub was discovered using data collected by Tim Taylor, CEO of the Lost 52 Project , which works to locate the 52 submarines sunk during World War II.

The USS Harder, led by famed Cmdr. Samuel D. Dealey, earned a legendary reputation during its fifth patrol when it sunk three destroyers and heavily damaged two others in just four days, forcing a Japanese fleet to leave the area ahead of schedule, the command said. That early departure forced   the Japanese commander to delay his carrier force in the Philippine Sea, which ultimately led to Japan being defeated in the ensuing battle.

But Harder's fortunes changed in late August 1944. Early on Aug. 22, Harder and USS Haddo destroyed three escort ships off the coast of Bataan. Joined by USS Hake later that night, the three vessels headed for Caiman Point, Luzon, before Haddo left to replenish its torpedo stockpile. Before dawn on Aug. 24, Hake sighted an enemy escort ship and patrol boat and plunged deep into the ocean to escape.

Japanese records later revealed Harder fired three times at the Japanese escort ship, but it evaded the torpedoes and began a series of depth charge attacks, sinking Harder and killing all 79 crewmembers.

The "excellent state of preservation of the site" and the quality of the data collected by Lost 52 allowed the Navy's History and Heritage Command to confirm the wreck was indeed Harder.

"Harder was lost in the course of victory. We must not forget that victory has a price, as does freedom," said NHHC Director Samuel J. Cox, U.S. Navy rear admiral (retired). "We are grateful that Lost 52 has given us the opportunity to once again honor the valor of the crew of the 'Hit 'em HARDER' submarine that sank the most Japanese warships – in particularly audacious attacks – under her legendary skipper, Cmdr. Sam Dealey."

Harder received the Presidential Unit Citation for her first five patrols and six battle stars for World War II service, and Cmdr. Dealey was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. During his career, Dealey also received a Navy Cross, two Gold Stars, and the Distinguished Service Cross.

Taylor, the Lost 52 Project CEO, previously located other submarines lost during World War II, including the  USS Grayback , USS Stickleback , and USS Grunion . Taylor received a Distinguished Public Service Award from the Navy in 2021 for his work.

The Naval History and Heritage Command said the SS Harder wreck "represents the final resting place of sailors that gave their life in defense of the nation and should be respected by all parties as a war grave."   

Other famed warships have been found in the waters off the Phillipines. In 2015, U.S. billionaire Paul Allen located the wreck of the Musash i, one of the two largest Japanese warships ever built, in the Philippines' Sibuyan Sea.

Last September, deep-sea explorers captured images of three shipwrecks from World War II's Battle of Midway, including the first up-close photos of a Japanese aircraft carrier since it sank during the historic battle in 1942.

• World War II
• Philippines

Stephen Smith is a managing editor for CBSNews.com based in New York. A Washington, D.C. native, Steve was previously an editorial producer for the Washington Post, and has also worked in Los Angeles, Boston and Tokyo.

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May 30, 2024

Voyager 1’s Revival Offers Inspiration for Everyone on Earth

Instruments may fail, but humanity’s most distant sentinel will keep exploring, and inspiring us all

By Saswato R. Das

Artist's rendering of a Voyager spacecraft in deep space.

Dotted Zebra/Alamy Stock Photo

Amid April’s litany of bad news—war in Gaza, protests on American campuses, an impasse in Ukraine—a little uplift came for science buffs.

NASA has reestablished touch with Voyager 1 , the most distant thing built by our species, now hurtling through interstellar space far beyond the orbit of Pluto. The extraordinarily durable spacecraft had stopped transmitting data in November, but NASA engineers managed a very clever work-around, and it is sending data again. Now more than 15 billion miles away, Voyager 1 is the farthest human object, and continues to speed away from us at approximately 38,000 miles per hour.

Like an old car that continues to run, or an uncle blessed with an uncommonly long life, the robotic spacecraft is a super ager that goes on and on—and, in doing so, has captivated space buffs everywhere.

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Launched on September 5, 1977, the one-ton Voyager 1 was meant to chart the outer solar system, in particular the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, and Saturn’s moon, Titan. Its twin, Voyager 2 , launched the same year, followed a different trajectory with a slightly different mission to explore the outer planets before heading to the solar system’s edge.

Those were NASA’s glory days. A few years earlier, NASA had successfully landed men on the moon—and won the space race for the U.S. NASA’s engineers were the envy of the world.

To get to Jupiter and Saturn, both Voyagers had to traverse the asteroid belt, which is full of rocks and debris orbiting the sun. They had to survive cosmic rays, intense radiation from Jupiter and other perils of space. But the two spacecraft made it without a hitch.

President Jimmy Carter held office when Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral; Elvis Presley had died just three weeks before; gas was about 60 cents a gallon; and, like now, the Middle East was in crisis, with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat trying to find peace.

Voyager 1 sent back spectacular photos of Jupiter and its giant red spot. It showed how dynamic the Jovian atmosphere was, with clouds and storms. It also took pictures of Jupiter’s moon Io, with its volcanoes, and Saturn’s moon Titan , which astronomers think has an atmosphere similar to the primordial Earth’s. The spacecraft discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons, which were named Thebe and Metis. On reaching Saturn, it discovered five new moons as well as a new ring.

And then Voyager 1 continued on its journey and sent images back from the edge of the solar system. Many of us remember the Pale Blue Dot , a haunting picture of the Earth it took on Feb 14, 1990, when it was a distance of 3.7 billion miles from the sun. The astronomer Carl Sagan wrote:

“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

By then Voyager 1 had long outlived its planetary mission but kept faithfully calling home as it traveled beyond the solar system into the realm of the stars. By 2012 Voyager 1 had reached the heliosphere , the farthest edge of the solar system. There, it penetrated the heliopause, where the solar wind ends, stopped by particles coming from the interstellar medium, the vast space between the stars. (Astronomers know that the space between the stars is not totally empty but permeated by a rarefied gas .)

From Voyager 1, scientists learned that the heliopause is quite dynamic and first measured the magnetic field of the Milky Way beyond the solar system. And its instruments kept sending data as it traveled through the interstellar medium.

On hearing that Voyager 1 had gone dark, I had checked in with Louis Lanzerotti , a former Bell Labs planetary scientist who did the calibrations for the Voyager 1 spacecraft and was a principal investigator on many experiments. He told me that a NASA manager in the 1970s had doubted that the spacecraft’s mechanical scan platform, which pointed instruments at targets, and very thin solid state detectors, which took those edge of the solar system readings, on the spacecraft would survive. They not only survived but worked flawlessly for all this time, Lanzerotti said, providing excellent data for decades. He was overjoyed on hearing the news that Voyager 1 was still alive.

Voyager 1 instruments have power until 2025 . After that, they will shut off, one by one. But there is nothing to stop the spacecraft as it speeds away from us in the vast emptiness of space.

Thousands of years from now, maybe when the human race has left this planet, Voyager 1, the tiny little spacecraft that could, will still continue its inexorable journey to the stars.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

The 13 Best Solo Cruises for 2024 (No Supplement Fare)

W hether you're embarking on your first cruise alone or you've been on solo cruises before, single travelers will find more options than ever when it comes to cruising solo. Many cruise lines offer single staterooms with the same amenities as other cabins, at a price similar to what you'd pay with double occupancy fares. You'll also find special promotions where the single supplement fee is reduced or waived, making it more affordable to reserve a spacious stateroom or luxurious suite with even more amenities – including personalized butler service, an added perk of booking with many luxury lines .

If you're ready for a maritime adventure, an extended vacation or simply a quick getaway from home, these top cruise lines offer some of the best options for solo travelers on waterways around the world.

Lines with solo accommodations and waived fees

Norwegian cruise line.

Launched in 2010, Norwegian Epic was the first cruise ship in the industry to feature studio accommodations for solo travelers. Norwegian Cruise Line offers this category on nine of the 19 ships in its fleet, including the newest ship, Norwegian Viva. These cabins, at an average size of 100 square feet, are designed and priced with the solo traveler in mind. They have no single supplements – and studio rooms on board Norwegian Bliss even boast virtual windows.

Guests of the studios get access to the private Studio Lounge. In this exclusive space, you can socialize with other solo travelers and enjoy complimentary refreshments. There are also singles meetups throughout the voyage and plenty of fun-filled onboard activities to mingle with like-minded cruisers. Solo travelers can check out all the fun for singles on Norwegian Viva this winter on a cruise to the Caribbean , or in spring 2024 as the ship sets sail for the Mediterranean .

Book a Norwegian Cruise Line voyage on GoToSea, a service of U.S. News.

MSC Cruises

MSC Cruises offers interior and balcony solo cabins for single cruisers on its Meraviglia-class ships: the MSC Meraviglia, Bellissima, Grandiosa, Virtuosa and the newest vessel in the fleet, MSC Euribia. The second-newest ship, MSC World Europa, has 28 cabins – 10 Studio Interior and 18 Studio Ocean View staterooms – designed specifically for solo travelers. MSC World America, set to debut in 2025, will also feature the solo studio staterooms.

During voyages with MSC Cruises , single cruisers are invited to a complimentary, hosted cocktail party to mix and mingle with other solo travelers. The daily program is also an excellent source to discover additional activities, entertainment and opportunities to meet other cruisers. You'll have onboard special events like the themed 70s-inspired Flower Party and the White Party, where the ship is decked out in festive white decor and guests don their best white attire. In addition, there are various sports tournaments, or you can show off your culinary expertise during a MasterChef competition.

MSC's Caribbean and Bahamas cruises departing from Miami and New York City feature an overnight visit to Ocean Cay, the line's private island and marine reserve. While there, singles can participate in fun-filled evening activities like a Champagne Sunset Cruise or a glow paddleboarding excursion in the lagoon, then attend the lively Luna Libre Party and the lighthouse show.

Find an MSC Cruises itinerary on GoToSea.

Holland America Line

Three of Holland America Line's newest ships each offer 12 solo cabins to accommodate single travelers: the Pinnacle-class Nieuw Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Konigsdam. These ocean view staterooms range in size from 127 to 172 square feet and feature the same amenities as the double occupancy cabins but with a double bed. The cruise line's Single Staterooms are priced for one person. If a guest chooses to book a different stateroom, single supplements for double occupancy cabins are as much as 100% over the standard fare, depending on the voyage and the cabin category.

Long committed to solo travelers, the line offers many activities where guests can meet other singles such as wine tastings, cocktail mixers, exercise classes, daily quizzes, sports challenges and more. If you're a solo traveler and a member of AARP, Holland America is now the exclusive cruise benefit provider to AARP's members. Solo cruisers will have access to an AARP member-only onboard credit that ranges from $50 to $200, depending on the itinerary and stateroom category.

For itineraries, Holland America's Alaska cruises and cruisetours are perfect for solo travelers, offering many opportunities to connect with fellow cruisers. Another favorite for singles is the line's fall voyages sailing from Boston to Québec City or Montreal.

Explore Holland America Line deals on GoToSea.

Royal Caribbean International

Royal Caribbean International features studio staterooms on select ships that range in size from 101 to 199 square feet. These solo accommodations include interior rooms, virtual balcony staterooms and a super studio ocean view stateroom with a balcony. The cabins do not carry the single supplement fee singles encounter when booking other types of staterooms, making them an attractive option when traveling alone.

Once on board the ship, solo cruisers will have countless options to engage and socialize with other travelers. When it comes to dining with Royal Caribbean , make a reservation at the Japanese restaurant Teppanyaki for an entertaining meal with new friends, or join fellow foodies for the intimate Chef's Table experience (the dining venues vary by ship). Singles can also participate in onboard activities like trivia contests, drink seminars, escape rooms, dance classes and pool parties.

If you need more thrills to stay busy and to meet people, Royal Caribbean's ships feature world-class shows and entertainment alongside adrenaline-pumping rides and attractions. If you're sailing in the Caribbean, there are plenty of opportunities to meet and chat with other passengers at the line's private island, Perfect Day at CocoCay.

Compare Royal Caribbean International cruises on GoToSea.

Atlas Ocean Voyages

Luxury line Atlas Ocean Voyages offers single cruisers 183 square feet of beautifully appointed space in solo accommodations that come without single supplement fees. These ocean view staterooms feature a queen bed, a panoramic picture window, a private spa bathroom with a rain shower and body jets, a stocked minifridge replenished daily with personal favorites, and other luxurious amenities. Single guests can also book other stateroom or suite categories with single supplements starting at 50% of the double occupancy price.

The line's three intimate yacht-style cruise ships – World Navigator, World Traveller and the new World Voyager, whose inaugural season begins in Antarctica in November 2023 – are all-inclusive . Meals at all the dining venues, premium beverages and wines, gratuities, culturally immersive excursions, and more are included in the fare. With fewer than 200 guests on board, there's an atmosphere of conviviality on these ships – especially when exploring remote destinations with like-minded and adventurous travelers during expeditions in Antarctica and the Arctic.

Read: The Top Cruises on Small Ships

Celebrity Cruises

Celebrity Cruises' new Edge-class ships offer some of the best options for solo cruisers. The line's two newest vessels, Celebrity Beyond and Celebrity Ascent (set to debut in late 2023), each boast 32 single staterooms with an Infinite Veranda. In addition, Celebrity Apex has 24 solo cabins, and Celebrity Edge features 16 staterooms for individual guests. These one-person accommodations offer a minimum of 131 square feet of space and the same upscale amenities you'll find in other category staterooms on their ships. Solo guests can look for special promotions where the single supplement is waived on select Celebrity voyages throughout the year.

Once on board the vessel, check out the daily program for activities conducive to meeting others – like wine tastings, cocktail-making classes and more. You'll also enjoy thrilling top-notch entertainment around the ship in The Theatre, The Club and Eden. A few popular cruises for singles are the line's Caribbean and Mexico itineraries on Celebrity Beyond.

Book a Celebrity Cruise on GoToSea.

Virgin Voyages

The hip vibe on board the adults-only Virgin Voyages ships is ideal for solo cruisers looking to meet other travelers. Its superyacht-style ships – Scarlet Lady, Valiant Lady and Resilient Lady – offer 40 interior cabins ranging in size from 105 to 177 square feet. There are also six Sea View staterooms with portholes boasting between 130 to 190 square feet of space. These Insider and Sea View cabins are designed and priced for single travelers, with amenities like high-tech mood lighting and roomy rain showers. The line also runs promotions where solo cruisers can book double occupancy staterooms without paying a single supplement.

Activities and festival-like entertainment around the ships foster fast friendships. Diners will enjoy the interactive experience at Gunbae, the lively Korean barbecue venue. The "grog walk" is a fun pub stroll where solo sailors can join fellow mates while sipping and snacking their way through all the signature bars. For even more fun, check out the evening shipwide events such as the themed Scarlet Party, which features live music and immersive experiences. The line also hosts meetups for singles throughout each voyage.

Read: The Top Adults-Only Cruises

Avalon Waterways

Avalon Waterways' river and small-ship cruises traverse waterways around the world, including in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. The company waives the single supplement on a selection of staterooms, including its Panorama Suites, on select European and Asia departures. The company recommends booking early as the specially priced cabins do sell out. Solo travelers make up about 10% of the passengers on this river cruise line .

Avalon's fleet of Suite Ships operates in Europe and Southeast Asia and features cabins with a minimum of 172 square feet. About 80% of the staterooms are Panorama Suites, which have 200 feet of living space, beds with a view and the river cruise industry's only open-air balcony. With Avalon excursions, solo cruisers have opportunities to meet like-minded guests during immersive tours, cooking classes, wine tastings, yoga or fitness classes, biking or hiking trips, and more. Single guests can choose to dine at tables for just two people or ones that can accommodate up to eight passengers.

Read: Cruise Packing List: Essentials for Your Next Cruise

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AmaWaterways

Two single occupancy staterooms are available on four of AmaWaterways' river cruise ships: AmaDolce, AmaDante, AmaLyra and AmaCello. These accommodations do not have single supplement fees. Solo cruisers can also book staterooms with a 20% single supplement on select sailings in Europe and Southeast Asia. (Note that this pricing does not apply to certain stateroom categories and suites.)

With the friendly, small-ship atmosphere, solo cruisers will find it comfortable to socialize with other passengers and the crew. Onboard activities and immersive excursions also create opportunities for fostering friendships, especially among like-minded travelers. Excellent options for solo cruises include themed sailings centered around music and wine or the magical Christmas markets itineraries along the Danube, Rhone and Rhine rivers.

Explore AmaWaterways deals on GoToSea.

Lines with discounted supplement fares

Azamara's special offers for solo travelers include reduced single supplements of 25% to 50% of the double occupancy rate on select sailings. The line's four midsized sister ships – carrying no more than 700 passengers – are mostly all-inclusive. Amenities included in the cruise fare include most meals; standard spirits, wines and beers; bottled water, soft drinks, and specialty teas and coffees; shuttle service in port; gratuities; and complimentary AzAmazing Evenings ashore or Destination Celebration experiences on the ship. Dining at the two specialty restaurants is an additional cost unless guests have accommodations in the Club World Owner's Suites, Club Ocean Suite or Club Continent Suite.

Single guests on Azamara cruises will find events during the sailing and venues around the ship where you can mix and mingle with other solo travelers and chat with the friendly crew. Intimate and culturally immersive excursions also create opportunities to meet passengers with similar interests. Azamara Onward, the latest ship, boasts the new Atlas Bar, a great spot to meet other travelers.

For itineraries, Azamara's signature "Country-Intensive Voyages" are a favorite of solo cruisers, including the 10- or 11-night Greece Intensive Voyage. For an extended sailing, check out the festive 12-night Carnival in Rio Voyage, which features a stop in Rio de Janeiro during the city's famed Carnival.

Compare Azamara cruises on GoToSea.

Cunard Line

Cunard Line features dedicated solo staterooms on its three ships, priced at approximately 166% to 174% of the equivalent double occupancy cruise fare. Guests can choose between a spacious Britannia Inside or Britannia Oceanview cabin, or opt for a larger stateroom with a single supplement. For a little "me time" pampering while on board, solos will appreciate 24-hour room service, complimentary Penhaligon's toiletries and a chilled bottle of sparkling wine. Single guests will also be invited to get-togethers. You can either dine alone at venues around the ship such as the main dining room or choose to share a table with other passengers.

With an international mix of travelers, single cruisers will find many opportunities to meet and chat with others, especially during a Transatlantic Crossing. During the sailing, you'll find many enriching and relaxing activities that encourage socializing. According to Cunard , there's a sense of camaraderie and a passion around the voyage – and the unique travel experience of crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

Find a Cunard Line cruise on GoToSea.

Silversea Cruises

Luxury line Silversea Cruises offers 25% single supplements on various voyages throughout the year, including expedition cruises to destinations like the Galápagos Islands , Antarctica and the Arctic, and Greenland. The line's all-inclusive fares include luxurious ocean view suites, gourmet dining, complimentary wines and spirits, gratuities, onboard enrichment and entertainment, shore excursions, and more. Solo travelers will even have personalized butler service to indulge their every whim.

The line's fleet of a dozen intimate ships, carrying no more than 728 guests, offers a clubby atmosphere perfect for meeting solo and like-minded travelers. Single guests will also have the opportunity to engage with other solo passengers during a welcome reception with Champagne at the beginning of each voyage. Popular itineraries for Silversea's single cruisers include its Transoceanic journeys, a bucket list trip for many cruisers .

Explore Silversea Cruises deals on GoToSea.

Seabourn has special offers throughout the year where solo cruisers can take advantage of reduced pricing equal to double occupancy fares or discounts on the single supplement starting at 25% above the double occupancy fares. These rates are available on select voyages, including expedition cruises. Frequent solo cruisers and members of the luxury line's Seabourn Club Diamond Elite will also find reduced single supplements on Diamond Elite Single Supplement Sailings. In addition, club members receive invitations to exclusive events, where they can meet and mingle with fellow cruisers. Solo passengers are also invited to sit with the ship's officers, crew and entertainers at dinner – and there are hosted get-togethers for single travelers.

Solo cruisers will enjoy beautifully designed oceanfront suites and all-inclusive amenities on board Seabourn 's intimate ships. These perks include world-class dining; complimentary premium wine and spirits; a spa and wellness program in partnership with Dr. Andrew Weil; included gratuities; and the line's enrichment series, Seabourn Conversations. Single cruisers looking for an extended holiday will enjoy longer voyages on the line's newest purpose-built expedition ship, Seabourn Pursuit.

Compare Seabourn cruises on GoToSea.

Why Trust U.S. News Travel

Gwen Pratesi has been an avid cruiser since her early 20s. She has visited destinations around the globe on nearly every type of ship built, including the newest megaships, luxury yachts, expedition vessels, traditional masted sailing ships and intimate river ships on the Mekong River. She used extensive research and experience as a solo cruiser to write this article. Pratesi covers the travel and culinary industries for major publications, including U.S. News & World Report.

You might also be interested in:

• The Top Party Cruises
• The Top Transatlantic Cruises
• The Top 3-Day Cruise Itineraries
• Solo Travel for Women: The Best Places and Tips
• The Best Cruise Insurance Plans

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