2023-08-22 10:59:00
Hygiene on the high seas: The cruise industry was no longer concerned with an issue during the past Corona period. After all, it was important to protect guests and crew as best as possible against infection, not to spread viruses and to avoid a mass outbreak of disease on board or later on land under all circumstances.
After all, the most modern medical measures and equipment are available for this today – in contrast to earlier centuries, when medical knowledge was limited and personal hygiene was only given rudimentary attention.
This only changed with the advent of regular passenger traffic in the first half of the 19th century, at least for the paying guests on board: In 1842, for example, writer Charles Dickens found a washbasin on Cunard’s legendary first ocean liner, “Britannia”. in his cabin – the usual standard for a gentleman in first class at the time and quite comparable to good hostels on land.
Not every cabin with bathroom and toilet
However, the equipment on board still has a long way to go before the hygiene standards of today are reached. On Hapag’s “Augusta Victoria” – she embarked on the first luxury cruise to the Mediterranean in 1891 – every cabin has steam heating, electric lighting and a sink with running water.
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But the toilet and bath had to be shared by several guests, as was quite common even in grand hotels of the era. A steward allocates bathing times conscientiously, a tip ensures preferential treatment.
The photo from the 1930s shows how comfortably guests could spend the night on the “Queen Mary”.
Quelle: Getty Images
Up until the 1960s, not every cabin had its own bathroom and of course no toilet, at least not in the lower classes. This explains why many iconic ocean liners of the post-war era are not simply converted into cruise ships, but end up prematurely under the cutting torch: their cabins are simply not for sale on the cruise market.
Fresh water was precious on the cruise ship
Even modern desalination plants did not exist for a long time. While today fresh water can be produced from sea water on every cruise ship and is then available to guests in (almost) unlimited quantities, in the past it had to be carried in large tanks and was therefore extremely expensive.
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Only filtered seawater was available for the full bath. Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann liked it very much, he noted in 1934: “After that sticky, slightly putrid-scented bath in warm seawater in the morning, which impregnates the skin with salt and which I love very much, it is pleasant to think that one sleeps over night has rolled up a good piece of the unpredictable again.”
On the luxury liner “Augusta Victoria”, guests ate in a classy manner, but they had to share the toilet and bath with others
What: picture alliance/ arkivi
But man also travels first class, in contrast to the “mad reporter” Egon Erwin Kisch. He scrutinizes the common washrooms in the tourist class of a P&O liner as a sociotope – including their unthinkable, urgent narrowness: “The social life and activity mentioned begins every morning with a storm on the shaving basins in the washroom and on the bathtubs. The ladies scurry their way to the washroom more or less quickly, depending on whether it is more important to them to hide their unmade-up, unpowdered face or to show their garish silk kimono…”.
Disinfection with vinegar and tar
For many years, emigrants have fared less well than first-class passengers or cruise guests – for example on the notorious steerage deck. The sanitary conditions there were sometimes dramatic until the end of the 19th century. A replica of such a lightless mass quarters with narrow bed partitions can be seen today, for example, in BallinStadt Emigration Museum in Hamburg be visited.
At that time, vinegar water was considered a proven disinfectant, but also fumigation of the lower decks with corrosive sulfur vapors shortly before arrival at the port of destination. According to the ideas of the time, the acrid smoke was supposed to kill all pathogens.
Replica of a tween deck: the sanitary conditions, some of them dramatic, still prevailed here up until the end of the 19th century
Source: BallinStadt
The writer and cruise ship guest Mark Twain had to put up with it involuntarily on a shore excursion in Italy in 1867. For this purpose, he and his tour group are unexpectedly arrested by the police and locked in a windowless cell.
Twain writes with indignant undertones: “They smoked us out to protect themselves against cholera, even though we didn’t come from a contaminated port. We had left cholera far behind the whole time. But they have to keep the plagues away somehow, and fumigation is cheaper than soap.”
Sometimes this unhealthy procedure even ends fatally, for example on the emigrant ship “Austria” on the way to New York in 1858: There, a red-hot chain is immersed in a bucket filled with tar to produce smoke.
But the glowing chain accidentally falls onto the wooden deck, which immediately catches fire and before long the whole ship is on fire. More than 450 people lose their lives – it is one of the worst shipwrecks of that era.
Catastrophic conditions on the steerage
Iron and steel shipbuilding in the second half of the 19th century also brought significant improvements in accommodation.
But as late as 1880, the Scottish “Treasure Island” author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote indignantly about the hygienic conditions on the steerage deck, which even the ship’s doctor only dared to enter extremely reluctantly and at most in emergencies: “If the shack with sixteen alive, more or less crammed with unwashed human animals lying all night together in the same stuffy air and in the shambles of scraps of food, dirty bowls and musty bedding, there was not the slightest chance of health or cleanliness.”
Accordingly, the steerage passengers look dirty when they arrive in the United States after the two-week journey – not exactly a promising start to a new life. Stevenson complains, “All washing below decks was strictly forbidden. You might be able to wash your hands under the pump next to the galley, but that’s about it.”
Health check upon entry into the USA
Only after 1900 did the emigrants also benefit from the increasing comfort of the ocean liners: the intermediate deck gave way to comfortable, clean multi-bed cabins, there were washrooms and separate dining rooms with good food. The top ships of their time, such as the German “Imperator” (Hapag, 1913) or the legendary “Titanic” (White Star Line, 1912), set new standards here.
From 2022 they too can be Rose and Jack – on the Titanic II
It sounds like a fairy tale, but the Titanic is about to set sail again – as a replica, but on the original route and with all of today’s safety standards. The Australian billionaire Clive Palmer raves about it – of course without a doomsday scenario.
Source: WELT/Marc Pfitzenmaier and Mick Locher
The increasingly strict entry regulations in the USA also contribute to this: Anyone who does not pass the strict health check before arriving in New York at the Ellis Island immigrant lock – today a museum complex that is extremely well worth seeing – and is rejected by the authorities has to go back at the expense of the shipping company be transported to Europe.
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No wonder that the shipping companies have their passengers examined by doctors in advance and, as a precaution, occasionally quarantine them. Hapag general director Albert Ballin therefore has a huge accommodation and check-in terminal with sleeping and dining rooms, music pavilion, churches and synagogue as well as medical care built in Hamburg – the one named after him today „Ballinstadt“ on the Elbe island of Veddel.
What was considered an absolute showcase project with the highest hygienic standards at the time has now been reconstructed in parts as an emigration museum, true to the original.
Mark Twain defies quarantine
As early as 1867, Mark Twain had to struggle with rigid quarantine measures on his European cruise, which was immortalized in literature, just like a number of cruise guests at the beginning of the last corona pandemic: He was not allowed to go ashore. Because of cholera, Portugal and Malta are closing their ports completely, the Greek capital Athens can only be approached after eleven days of quarantine, so the captain wants to cancel the shore excursion and continue straight away.
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An impertinence for the antiquity enthusiast Twain, who makes a risky decision: At night he secretly rows ashore with three companions – always on the lookout for the police, who mercilessly punish such dangerous escapades with several months in prison.
But the daring venture succeeds, in the moonlight the quartet happily climbs around the Acropolis, only to be back on board in time the next morning. Breaking the quarantine and crossing the border illegally as a gentleman’s sport – from today’s perspective, an irresponsible and hardly calculable risk.
Hygiene becomes even more important on a cruise
After all: Twain survived his Greek adventure happily and without infection.
The strictest cleanliness, the highest standards of hygiene and effective medical controls will have a much higher priority than before. Charles Dickens and his fellow writers would certainly have been pleased.
This article was first published in May 2020.
Karsten Eichner is the author of the cruise books “Traumschiff Ahoi!” and “I love the sea like my soul” (both Koehler Verlag, Hamburg).
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