My First Sea Burial
Captain’s Log, October 27th: Our second sea day, on the way to Amsterdam. It’s somewhat disappointing that not many passengers have signed up for our city tour. It seems that word has got around that they can catch one of those double-decker buses and pay only a quarter of what we charge. Well, if the weather stays bad, they’ll regret it, as they’ll have a long walk in the rain to get to the bus stop.
Anyway, I can put that behind me as the day started with some excellent news. Mrs Blenkinsop, who fell asleep in the St Petersburg museum, has been released from prison. It seems there is still some suspicion of her motives, so her passport has been taken from her, and she is having to stay in a hotel until the court hearing next week. As she is obviously going to have financial difficulties, I did wonder about canceling the charges for the tour she missed in Helsinki, but the purser pointed out that if we made an exception for her, where would it end?
Following the unfortunate mishap with the lifeboat, yesterday, I realized that we had forgotten to do the safety drill on the first day of the cruise. One of our guiding principles on the ship is that there is nothing more important than health and safety, so we did it today. Unfortunately only a quarter of the passengers turned up at the muster points, as many were seasick and wanted to stay in their cabins. Anyway, from my point of view, the matter’s closed, and I recorded it as having been done on day one, to save any nit-picking by maritime authorities.
By the end of the day, the weather had improved considerably, ready for our passage into Amsterdam harbor. But a sad note. One of the passengers died this evening in his cabin. His wife blames the safety drill, as her husband fell several times on the stairs on the way to the muster point. This is of course nonsense and we told her so. The bizarre thing was that when we took the body to our mortuary, we discovered that there was another body already there! I went down to see for myself, and realized that this was the third of my unwelcome ‘guests’, who it seems had not swum ashore after all. I’m not familiar with gunshot wounds, but the hole in his forehead looked like strong evidence. This could all be very embarrassing for the ship, and particularly for myself, if we were to unload him back in London. I did wonder about leaving him in the mortuary, until we docked in the island of Gamalia on the forthcoming Caribbean cruise, but I decided that the poor fellow deserved better. Accordingly, I changed the route of the ship to take us further offshore, and then at midnight gave the mystery guest a decent sea burial.
