Captain was forced to ‘abandon ship’ in cruise liner inferno

It’s the order every ship’s master must dread and hopes never to come to pass: “abandon ship”. But Norwegian-born Captain Otto Thoresen, 51, had to utter the fateful words on April 8 1966.

Captain Thoresen was married to Buckie native Mary, and lived in the town at Brevik, 34 West Church Street.

He was master of the Norwegian ship Viking Princess, and president of Flagship Line, the booking agency for the luxury liner.

Viking Princess was moored off Cuba when fire broke out in the engineroom of the liner and swept through the vessel on this day in 1966.

Five people were reported dead and up to four missing as the drama unfolded.

Nearby vessels picked up 490 survivors and took them to the US Navy base at Guantanamo.

Most arrived aboard the German freighter Cap Norte, while a Liberian tanker, Navigator, picked up 80 and Taiwan freighter Chunking Victory took 13 aboard.

The passengers were mostly Americans on a Caribbean cruise.

Captain Thoresen, with 30 years’ experience, gave the order to abandon ship,

and the passengers were ordered from their airconditioned cabins and staterooms into lifeboats.

It must have been terrifying as they plunged down in darkness towards the sea in an area known as Hurricane Alley.

Half the crew of 260 also abandoned ship, leaving the rest to fight the fire.

But they too were driven into the boats by the advancing flames.

At one stage the fire was reported to have enveloped the ship’s superstructure, but she remained afloat.

The captain had two children, Charlotte, aged 20, and Otto, 9. He’d last been home in Buckie the previous October.

The family had a narrow escape – they’d all spent the previous summer aboard the Viking Princess on a cruise.

The ship was later taken to Port Royal, Jamaica, for recovery work.

The P&J reminded readers that only four months earlier, another cruise ship – the 5,000-ton Yarmouth Castle – went down in flames off the Bahamas, not far from the Viking Princess inferno.

And at Christmas three years earlier in 1963, a Greek cruise ship Lakonia caught fire and sank in the Atlantic with the loss of 125 lives.

DREADED ORDER: Newspaper headlines and the ship which caught fire and was abandoned on this day in 1966.

Repair crews climb aboard the cruise liner in Jamaica.