Tale of Two Ships

"You had better listen to this boat drill," Captain Otto Thoresen cautioned passengers. "Next time it might be the real thing." As the 30-minute no-nonsense safety demonstration proceeded, the Viking Princess steamed out of Miami on a seven-day pleasure cruise. Last week, in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, the cruise was nearing its end when the real thing did happen. The Princess was ablaze.

In many ways, the fire that swept the 16-year-old Norwegian vessel resembled that aboard the Yarmouth Castle, the Panamanian-registered cruise ship on which 90 people--mostly passengers--died last November. In both cases the vessels were plying well-traveled Caribbean channels and carrying about 500 passengers and crewmen beneath idyllic, moonlit skies. As foreign ships, neither conformed fully to American safety standards. Each of the fires occurred in the early-morning hours, when only a few revelers lingered on deck.

There were also dramatic differences between the two. The most notable: the Viking Princess's efficient, seasoned crew, mostly Norwegian, and its stout red-mustached skipper, a veteran of 36 years at sea. By contrast, the Castle was commanded by a green Greek who received a stinging rebuke for negligence from the U.S. Coast Guard for, among other indiscretions, holding no fire drill for his passengers and being among the first to leave the ship.

Aboard the Princess, a muffled explosion was followed by billowing smoke from the engine room, where efforts to douse the flames proved useless. Under Thoresen's direction, crewmen calmly roused passengers from bed, outfitted them with life jackets and supervised their evacuation, women and children first. The ship's steel lifeboats, with a total capacity of 874, were lowered in minutes. While crewmen remained behind to search all cabins, nearby freighters picked up the passengers to transport them to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo.

Two passengers died of heart attacks, but all 494 others aboard (including 246 crewmen) survived. The last to leave his vessel was Captain Thoresen, murmuring "I lost a good friend in that ship." When he arrived at Guantanamo, his waiting passengers, many of them still in pajamas, greeted him with round after round of cheers. Not one of them had even got wet.

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