Titanic 2020

Ten years ago I read a book called Titanic 2020 by Colin Bateman. It was about a boy, Jimmy Armstrong, who stows away on the New Titanic in Belfast. He travels with the ship meeting new people as the world around them descends into chaos as a disease infects and kills the world. In this book, the disease is a man-made and is cured by a concoction of herbs mixed together by an elderly woman. In January 2020 this fictional world came true with the covid-19 pandemic starting in China in 2019. However, where the real world is different from Bateman’s imagined one is that cruise ship are not the imagined sanctuary of the novel sailing across the seas and staying clear of the infection, but are the perfect place for the disease to spread the infection. Far from being seen as the only way of survival in the novel the cruise industry may not survive this pandemic.

In March we starting hearing, on the news, about many cruises which had cases of the virus on board. Many of the government and health authorities choose to handle these outbreaks in different ways. In Japan, the Diamond Princess was told to keep passengers and crew quarantine aboard the ship. The government has since come out and said it mishandle this situation as it led to more people contracting the virus. Others such as the Ruby Princess were not quarantined even after cases were found on board. This failure to act in Australia by the cruise line or by local government created hundreds of cases all over the world. After the fact the Australian authorities have looked into how Princess Cruises, owned by Carnival, could have misled or headed the extent of the virus from the Australian authorities.

Where Bateman’s novel could have taken a queue from history and seen cruises and ships as a threat rather than the saviour is in the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. There is a famous story of an American troop transport ship the U.S.S Leviathan, that set sail on 29th September from New York. Already 120 men and there were 12,000 people aboard, including nurses and crew. By the time it reached France 2,000 men had the flu, and nearly a hundred had died. This story is a warning from history that lots of people crammed together on a ship will easily pass the virus on but in 2020 cruise ships continued to sail.

The fiction and history of pandemics tell us to do different things. One that ships are the saviour and two that ships are a death trap. I think that history is proven to be right especially after recent events. Like everything this to will pass and the cruising industry will eventually come back but like the world after Covid-19 the question isn’t if it will come back, it is in what form it will come back?

Bibliography

Arnold, C. (2020) ‘Ship of Death: The Tragic Tale of the USS Leviathan’ in The History Reader Available at: https://www.thehistoryreader.com/world-history/ship-of-death-the-tragic-tale-of-the-uss-leviathan/

Bateman, C. (2007) ‘Titanic 2020’ Published by: Hodder Children’s

BBC (2018) ‘The Flu that Killed 50 Million’ Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0blmn5l/the-flu-that-killed-50-million

BBC (2002) ‘Coronavirus Cruises’ in Our World Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000krvg/our-world-coronavirus-cruises

Topham, G. (2020) ‘Carnival cruises posts $3bn quarterly loss due to Covid’ in The Guardian Available at:  https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/sep/15/carnival-cruises-posts-3bn-quarterly-loss-due-to-covid