Relive the white-glove glamour of the trans-Atlantic cruise
For seasoned travellers, spending days at sea on the iconic route is more glamorous than jetsetting away.
Right now, my neighbours are somewhere mid-Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary 2 sailing to Southampton. Passionate cruisers until Covid turned them into involuntary landlubbers, they booked the minute that Cunard lifted restrictions last November. Just before they left New York, they reminded me, “It’s a crossing, not a cruise.” I already knew that. About 25 years ago, I boarded the Queen Elizabeth 2 in Southampton for a westbound crossing to New York.
If you think you crossed the Atlantic on a ship within the past 50 years, you are probably not wrong. But that was likely a repositioning cruise, designed to get a ship from one cruising ground, say the Caribbean, to another, perhaps Europe. Or your ship was circumnavigating the globe on a world cruise. Except for Cunard, the venerable Atlantic “shuttle” ended abruptly in 1974 when the glorious French oceanliner France stopped crossing (and eventually became the cruise ship Norway).
I’ve always thought that a crossing should be on everyone’s bucket list. I suspect some people will disagree with me, but I firmly believe that six consecutive days at sea is more glamorous than a simple trip to Istanbul or Bangkok. It’s not as hard to pull off as Everest. As for the Pyramids, they turn up so often in books and on TV you might ask, “Do I really need to see them up-close?”
Cunard’s ocean-faring days date to 1840, after Canadian-born Samuel Cunard was awarded the first British transatlantic mail contract. RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Britannia sailed from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia and Boston. Charles Dickens was one of the decade’s earliest passengers. So was Frederick Douglass, to whom Mr. Cunard apologised after a segregated passage, vowing “nothing of the kind will again take place on the steamships in which I am concerned.”
The original Queen Mary launched in 1936, ferrying countless celebrities across the pond. Other Atlantic greyhounds from Cunard followed, notably Queen Elizabeth (1938). Queen Elizabeth 2 arrived in 1967. The original Queen Mary was the old salty dog though, logging 1,000 crossings before beginning her new life in Long Beach, Calif., in 1971, as a hotel (currently closed). The Queen Mary 2 arrived on the scene in 2004 to take up the route.
Although a behemoth with room for 2,500 passengers, the Queen Mary 2 was still built for speed, with a thicker hull and sharper prow to slice through stormy seas. Her aft decks taper and are open to the sky, avoiding the bulky look of yet another condo that slid off the Jersey Palisades and floated out to sea.
For Cunard’s first ship in over a decade, the company dipped into the Royal archives again to christen the Queen Anne, slated to set sail in January 2024. Bookings go on sale next week, May 18, for passage on the maiden voyage, a seven-night cruise out of Southampton with an overnight call in Lisbon. You can also reserve through April 26, 2024, for cruises of varying lengths — in the Canary Islands, western Mediterranean, Caribbean, and along the coast of Norway — some of which will cross the Atlantic.
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What to expect on your crossing
- If you’re leaving from the U.S., you will leave from New York and sail back to port there. (Sorry, Fort Lauderdale.) You will not stop anywhere in between. (Sorry, Bermuda.)
- A few nights will call for formal dress, a nod to the glory days of first-class travel. Bring a black tie.
- There may be someone “interesting” on board who was not paid by the company to be on board. On my crossing, it was master caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. For a 2019 eastbound voyage on the Queen Mary 2, Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest and Candice Bergen appeared on deck for the filming of HBO’s “Let Them All Talk,” with passengers urged to play extras. In the old days, the best celeb to spot was Elizabeth Taylor, who spent her honeymoon in 1950 on the original Queen Mary with first husband Conrad “Nicky” Hilton, Jr. She crossed with Cunard multiple times, including on the QE2 with RB2, aka Richard Burton, whom she married and divorced twice
- You will have ample time to take advantage of all the shipboard activities, every single one. Now’s the time to learn how to fold a napkin into a swan, dance the rumba or throw a rubber ring across a net in pursuit of a deck tennis superiority. Or you can do what I did and skip all the activities and do nothing other than eat, nap and read. For me, that’s the best part about a crossing — an endless weekend with zero guilt.
The Wall Street Journal