Passengers describe Zaandam’s voyage to ‘the end of the world’
• The ‘bucket list’ cruise aboard the Zaandam started with passengers confident they’d stay safe in the early days of the coronavirus epidemic. They had no idea what was ahead of them.
For passengers aboard Holland America’s March 7 cruise from Buenos Aires, the 31-day “Collectors voyage” aboard the Zaandam was to be a comfort-filled exploration of Latin America. They would see rockhopper and macaroni penguins in the Falklands, sample grilled sausages at an asado in Montevideo, Uruguay, and sail amid gleaming glaciers and around Cape Horn, where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans collide.
One of the highlights of the itinerary was a visit to the rugged southernmost mountain town of Ushuaia, Argentina, also
known as “el fin del mundo,” the end of the world.
“How perfect is that? Or how perfect could it have been,” said Penny Pompei, 78, of West Palm Beach, who boarded the Zaandam with her husband, Carl, 81, Pompei, in Buenos Aires.
Like the other 1,241 passengers aboard, the Pompeis’ minds were more attuned to glaciers and wildflowers than world news. They had not focused on how the newly discovered coronavirus had swept through a cruise ship anchored off the coast of Japan, killing eight and sickening more than 700, in early February. A few weeks later, the U.S. banned travel from Italy, South Korea and Iran — then hotspots for the newly christened COVID-19. The first American died from the virus in Washington state.
“When you think back, it was something that was happening to China. There weren’t any warnings,” Pompei said. “We would have reconsidered if that were the case. It wasn’t in New York. It wasn’t anywhere.”
Other passengers, like Rick de Pinho, 53, and wife Wendy, knew about the issues with Diamond Princess in Japan and hoped that since the same company, Miami-based Carnival
Corp., owned both ships it would incorporate any lessons learned. They got emails from the company saying their temperatures would be taken before they got on board; they weren’t.
“It was a decision that we agonized over, but we were reassured by our Holland America travel agent that we would be OK and never put in harm’s way,” he said.
For both passengers and the 586 crew members aboard the Zaandam, that promise proved impossible to keep. At first, the ship served as a bubble, insulating those on board from the rapidly changing outside world. Then, the virus took root. It spread through the Zaandam by coughs in crowded rooms; fear quickly followed. Before the cruise finally ended, the virus would claim four lives and sicken hundreds as port after port — most of them regular beneficiaries of port fees and tourism dollars from cruise passengers — turned the Zaandam away.
“The international community, consistently generous and helpful in the face of human suffering, shut itself off to Zaandam leaving her to fend for herself,” the president of Holland America Line, Orlando Ashford, wrote in an op-ed published in the Sun Sentinel. “It’s tempting to speculate about the illnesses that may have been avoided or lives saved if we’d gotten the assistance we sought weeks ago.”
With each rejection, interviews and social media posts reveal growing anguish on board. Passengers and crew feared for their lives as they grew sicker and sicker, or worried that their next breaths could bring the invading virus.
With each new port rejection came another day trapped in a cabin, and the dawning realization that this voyage was taking passengers to the end of the world as they knew it.
The following report was compiled from Miami Herald interviews and passenger posts on social media.
AN EAGER START
MARCH 7: More than a thousand eager passengers boarded the Zaandam, thrilled to experience a “bucket list” trip to the tip of South America. Many got to Buenos Aires a few days early to adjust to the time change, sip Malbec and indulge in Argentina’s famed beef.
Cecilia Bordenet, a passenger from Seattle, said she and her husband were “leaving coronavirus behind” in favor of “warm, sunny Buenos Aires.”
Andrea Anderson, 63, of Ohio, who sailed with her husband, Rob, posted on Facebook. “We will board a cruise ship, yes, a deadly cruise ship. Yes, I have heard all of the warnings and I am not concerned. Stay tuned. Bon voyage!”
The ship overnighted in Buenos Aires, leaving on the evening of March 8 with plans to stop in San Antonio, Chile, on March 21. An additional 400 passengers planned to stick around for another 20 days on the ship with a final destination of Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. The second leg of the voyage was targeted at retirees, people with time and money for lengthy, comfortable vacations — as well as increased vulnerability to the virus.
The day after the ship set sail, the U.S. State Department warned Americans to stay away from cruises.
In Uruguay, the first stop, some visited the hewn stone gates of Colonial del Sacramento, a city founded by the Portuguese in 1680, and strolled the gently sloping cobbled streets. Others rode horses and relaxed at lowslung ranches with ivydraped columns.
In the Falkland Islands, they delighted in taking selfies with the hordes of penguins.
It seemed like the virus truly couldn’t follow the vacationers. Crew diligently wiped down handrails, tables and elevator buttons. Hand sanitizing stations appeared at every turn.
Passengers took extra precautions too. de Pinho, a frequent cruiser, said for the first time he avoided taking a dip in the ship’s hot tub and pool. Other passengers swiped disinfectant wipes across every nook and cranny in their stateroom every night.
But it wasn’t enough.
INCREASING AWARENESS
MARCH 13: As the Zaandam sailed through the Straits of Magellan toward Punta Arenas, Chile, the virus became real for passengers. President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, and Holland America Line announced it would pause all cruising for a month.
Despite the news, life remained unchanged aboard the Zaandam.
De Pinho said the cello show was spectacular that evening. “They played ‘Titanic,’ and really it went through my mind how the band played on even though a crisis of sorts,” he said.
USHUAIA STOP CANCELED
MARCH 14: The Zaandam pulled into port at Punta Arenas, Chile, for a day of craft-brewery hopping and tours to the breathtaking peaks of Torres del Paine National Park. All the passengers filed back on board that evening for happy hour at the Crow’s Nest and a magic show.
It would be the last time anyone aboard set food on land for weeks.
Hours after the ship set off, the Captain made a troubling announcement. The cruise wouldn’t be stopping in Ushuaia as planned. Argentina had closed its borders to cruise ships.
Instead, the ship doubled back to Punta Arenas with the promise that passengers could disembark and fly home if they got there in time. Passengers grumbled as they booked expensive and lengthy flights home from the city’s tiny airport.
But when they arrived, the Chilean government had changed its mind. No one was allowed off the ship. Chile closed its borders officially on March 16, after the ship had been docked in port for two days waiting for permission to let passengers off.
Back home, the net of restrictions meant to slow the spread of the disease grew tighter. On the 15th, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended no groups of 50 or more. On the 16th that shrank to 10.
FREE WINE AT DINNER
MARCH 17: For days to come, passengers would freely roam the ship while the Zaandam desperately tried to find a port to accept it.
To compensate, the ship provided free wine at dinner, but “don’t worry, it’s not Chilean wine,” the captain joked. The comedian noted he had a captive audience, as the ship stayed anchored off historic Valparaiso, Chile, for a couple of days to figure out its next move.
Chile refused to let passengers disembark but allowed the Zaandam to refuel and stock up on three weeks’ worth of supplies.
Passengers took dance lessons, cooking classes and gathered for tea time every day at 3 p.m. The casino and library were open and packed. There was even a gala dinner attended by the captain.
“We are not confined to our cabin, the buffet is still open, no one is sick, we still have entertainment. It’s like the whole world is in lockdown and we’re on a cruise ship without any ports of call,” Oklahoma passenger Susan Reed Davis posted on Facebook.
As cruisers drank, danced, swam and socialized on board, the virus changed the world around them. It also started to spread among them.
COUGHING AT THE SHOW
MARCH 21: By now, it was clear the Zaandam would not be able to drop off most of its passengers in San Antonio, Chile, as once planned. So northward they went, tracing the route of the extended itinerary all the way to Fort Lauderdale’s Port Everglades.
The de Pinhos noticed several people coughing during a show that night. The New Jersey couple moved seats twice to avoid people who “didn’t know how to use their elbow.”
They saw, for the first time, crew members wearing masks while they sanitized a room.
The next day, the world aboard the Zaandam shrank further.
De Pinho was just 15 minutes into a game of Texas Hold’em when the captain made an announcement. Passengers were confined to their cabins. Holland America Line announced that 42 people, including 29 crew members, had reported flu-like symptoms.
“OK, I’m officially done with this adventure.,” Reed Davis posted, along with a picture of her stateroom window, her new view for the foreseeable future.
There were no COVID-19 tests on board, so there was no way to know for sure what was spreading through passengers and crew.
The Zaandam tried to dock at every country along the way, but they kept getting rejected — first by Peru, then Ecuador, then Colombia.
Holland America Line surveyed its nearest ships and decided the Rotterdam, staffed with 611 crew members, would race from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to meet the Zaandam off the coast of Panama to provide supplies, medical staff and muchneeded COVID tests.
PLAN FOR RENDEZVOUS
MARCH 24: As the Zaandam coursed north, more people got sick. On March 24, 77 people were ill, including 47 crew members, the company said.
At the same time, the plan to find safe harbor in Port Everglades was at risk. In Broward County, elected
officials debated whether to allow a ship full of sick people to flood their community. At this point, at least three cases of COVID-19 had been tied to Broward’s Port Everglades.
Those aboard the Zaandam “knowingly put themselves at risk,” Broward County Commissioner Michael Udine said at an emergency meeting on the subject. “Under no circumstances should that ship be at Port Everglades.
“You expect Broward County residents, who are locked in their houses, whose businesses got crumbled away, people are dying, and then say a cruise ship that disembarked from South America after this whole thing blew up ... now they want to dock at Port Everglades?”
Meanwhile, sister Holland America ship Rotterdam prepared for a rendezvous. Crew said they were originally told they would be transferring necessary supplies and medical staff to the Zaandam, but a few days before the handoff they found out they were getting something else in return — passengers.
Holland America Line told crew members it planned to shift more than 800 passengers to the Rotterdam, a move that panicked some crew. The company didn’t have nearly enough tests to confirm that the transferred passengers were coronavirus-free. The plan was simply to take their temperature and ask if they were experiencing any symptoms.
“Is it humanitarian to do this to the Rotterdam crew, that is here to support their families? Has anyone paused to think what is Holland America Line going to tell their parents, children, when they get infected and eventually die? Are they not seeing the news?” said a crew member aboard the Rotterdam who asked for anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “Who cares!? After all is crew members who are sent to slaughter!!!!”
The company circulated a document to the increasingly anxious Rotterdam crew with misleading — and in some cases outright wrong— information about their potential risk of catching the disease.
The document assured crew that there was little risk because passengers have already been isolated for five to six days and people with COVID-19 usually show symptoms “in about three to five days,” which is incorrect. The CDC says infected people can show symptoms anytime between two and 14 days, and some people contract the disease without showing any symptoms at all.
Then came the deaths.
DEATHS AT SEA
MARCH 27: The cruise line announced four passengers aboard the Zaandam had died, two people had tested positive for COVID-19 and now 138 people on board were sick. The Zaandam had just reached the Panama Canal and met up with the Rotterdam.
With those confirmed cases on board, the ship now ran afoul of Panama’s rule blocking infected ships from crossing the canal.
“If there are confirmed cases of COVID-19, the ship has to go into quarantine,” the administrator of the Panama Canal Authority, Ricaurte Vásquez, told Telemetro Reporta. “If there are elements of contagion, the ship has to go into quarantine. That is not an alternative or an option.”
As the company scrambled to secure a passage through the canal and onward to Port Everglades, the ships began transferring passengers.
Laura Gabaroni, one of the passengers who switched boats, said hazmat-suited crew members knocked on their door and escorted them to boats. Their luggage was sprayed with disinfectant.
Neon orange tender boats ferried groups of maskswathed passengers (and, potentially, the coronavirus) from ship to ship. Terrified Rotterdam crew members hid in their rooms, they told the Herald.
Zaandam passengers begged to get off the sick ship. With Panama’s strict rules, they worried that the Rotterdam was their only chance of getting through the canal and back to Port Everglades.
Family members of vulnerable passengers posted increasingly distressed messages on social media.
“My mom has a preexisting lung condition, and that made no difference in my dad’s plea to move ships. I have called Holland America myself and they can only tell me that they will escalate and put it in their “system” for notification to the ship,” wrote Amy Hutton Williams of Missouri.
“I am helpless. They are helpless.”
A Facebook group sprung up for passengers and their loved ones to share news and coordinate advocacy. It was mostly filled with worry — worry about sick family members on the ship, about whether the ship would ever dock and about whether more people would die before this was over.
“Please just get my parents home, airlift them, let the army take them — any which way,” wrote Magda Glazik. “Please... this is torture now treating these people for political point scoring , often elderly and weak and playing with their lives.”
When Penny Pompei and her husband realized they weren’t getting off the Zaandam, they were devastated.
“I can’t even begin to describe what it was like to see the last of the boats pull away and go to the other ship. I thought, ‘God, are we going to survive this?’ I cried,” Pompei said. “If you’re stuck on a ship that has 200 sick people and four dead you just think — is it in the air? Should I not breathe? Should I stay outside all the time? You just don’t know. It’s the not knowing that is so terribly frustrating.”
Salvation came late that night, when Panama reversed its position and allowed the ships to pass through the canal, after receiving a promise that no one from either ship would set foot on Panamanian soil, and no canal workers would board the ships.
In the dead of night, with its light off, and strict orders to keep cabin curtains closed, the ships slipped through the canal and continued their journey to Port Everglades, though they still lacked docking approval.
The Zaandam, with a long list of rejections behind it, tried to medically evacuate two critically ill patients with Covid-19 to Mexico, but they were turned down.
MOOD DARKENS
March 30: On board the Zaandam, passengers continued to get sick. Gloria Weed, 70, told the Miami Herald her 75-year-old husband couldn’t get a bed in the infirmary because it was too full. He had pneumonia and couldn’t eat or swallow pills. She had run a fever for nine days straight.
“My husband really needs to be in a hospital before it’s too late,” she said.
On the Rotterdam, the mood darkened as passengers coped with quarantine inside tiny staterooms for days on end.
“We haven’t been able to breathe fresh air in several days; It can feel like the walls are closing in at times, and it’s starting to wear on us,” said Laura Gabarino Huergo, a passenger who grew up in Palmetto Bay and now lives in Central Florida.
But in Florida, leaders still couldn’t decide whether or not to accept the ship even as it edged closer by the day.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said it was the cruise line’s responsibility to care for its sick and said dropping off a load of ill people in the community with the most cases in the state “didn’t sound good.”
The President of Holland America Line, Orlando Ashford, pleaded in his op-ed for Florida to accept the ships.
“Nations are justifiably focused on the COVID-19 crisis unfolding before them. But they’ve turned their backs on thousands of people left floating at sea. Are these reactions based on facts from experts like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), or fueled by irrational fear? What happened to compassion and help thy neighbor?” he wrote.
BROWARD DEBATES
MARCH 31: Passengers had now spent two straight weeks in their 210-squarefoot staterooms. They worried that anything could jeopardize their return to solid land.
“Will anybody ever let us off the boat? Are we going to be stuck out here on a cruise to nowhere for forever?” wondered Penny Pompei.
Broward County commissioners debated the topic for five hours and still couldn’t make up their minds. Between the two ships, there were now nine confirmed cases of COVID-19. Over the course of the cruise, 97 passengers and 136 crew presented with influenzalike symptoms, the company said.
Rep. Evan Jenne, a Democrat from Dania Beach, called leaving the passengers aboard without medical care “borderline inhumane.”
“At what point do you throw your humanity away?” he said. “There are two dozen Floridians on that boat and they need to come home. Leaving them at sea may not be a death sentence, but it’s a sentence of some kind.”
Then, later in the day, Trump said in a press conference he didn’t want the Zaandam to become “a ghost ship.” After a call with the president, who said he would “like to see a solution,” DeSantis changed his tune and agreed to allow the ships to dock.
On board the Zaandam, guests were treated to an in-stateroom gala dinner: lobster and steak, with chocolates for dessert.
Rotterdam captain Bas Van Dreumel sent champagne to the passengers in their rooms.
LAST-MINUTE WRANGLING
APRIL 2: By dawn, the two ships had sailed within view of the Miami skyline. But Broward and Carnival Corp. spend most of the day wrangling over a the plan to evacuate passengers, and the docking time was delayed. Finally, the entities signed a nine-page agreement that detailed how the company would safely get hundreds of passengers home or hospitalized without straining Broward’s already thinly stretched medical resources.
Around 6 p.m., the Zaandam finally docked at Port Everglades; it was greeted by a handful of passersby.
One man waved a palm frond. Another saluted. The Rotterdam followed about 30 minutes later.
White hazmat-suited workers whisked away the four dead and 14 sick in ambulances.
More than 1,200 passengers slowly trickled out, flying home to their corner of the world by charter flight or shuttling home in private cars and vans.
The next day, the de Pinhos, and hundreds of others from both ships, received flight information. They strapped masks on, boarded a private bus with plenty of room between passengers and rode to the Fort Lauderdale Airport. An Eastern Airlines charter plane took them to Atlanta.
Delays on the cruise side meant the couple arrived at the Atlanta airport too late for their flight. They decided to grab a bite to eat while they waited, and they were horrified at the possibility they could spread the virus here, at the busiest airport in the world..
“How did we go from people dressed around us with hazmat suits in the morning to being in a restaurant where servers were not wearing masks? It was an epic failure to put us in the general public — a risk to those serving us and even to us given the spread of the virus,” dePin ho said. “Holland America sadly dropped the ball!”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has since banned cruise ships from sending potentially infected passengers home via commercial flights.
Others had smoother rides home, including Oklahoma couple Susan and Jeff Davis. On social media, they posted a picture at their home, posing with a handful of limes, a bottle of tequila and matching plastic cups that read “Zaandam quarantine 2020 survivor.”
STILL STUCK
APRIL 9: Back on the ships, a handful of guests and thousands of crew members were still waiting to go home.
There were 53 people (29 guests and 24 contract service workers) waiting for a charter flight aboard the Rotterdam. The Zaandam decamped from Port Everglades for a 14-day quarantine at sea. That means all crew members not required for essential operations (and there are hundreds of them) would stay isolated.
“Holland America Line is also working on final details as to where the ships will lay up until operations resume and the repatriation of crew that are not required to remain on the ship for essential operations during this period,” said company spokesman Erik Elvejord.
One of those contract service workers who got to go home was the Zaandam’s pianist, Jamsheed Master. He marked the occasion with a reflective post on Facebook.
“Back in the Before Times, at the end of every cruise the entire crew would bundle onto the stage and sing this god-awful song called ‘Love in Any Language.’ It was atrocious, but a tiny part of it has stuck in my heart for all these years. Over the last few weeks aboard Zaandam, we have experienced unbelievable tragedy and scenes nobody could have imagined aboard a luxury cruise liner. But I have also witnessed acts of unconditional kindness, human beings smiling from behind masks, people throwing themselves into the flames of sickness, risking their own health to help those who need it. People continuing somehow to love, while our little world collapses around us,” he wrote.
He included the lyrics at the end of his post, finishing with the verse “And once we learn to speak it, all the world will hear, Love in any language, fluently spoken here.”
“I told you it was awful,” Master wrote.
Miami Herald staff writer Samantha Gross contributed to this report.