When does a passenger become a soul?

A few years ago I was invited to spend four days along the coast of Mozambique aboard the Italian-owned cruise liner, Symphony.

The 16 000 ton liner (it has since been renamed) was a beautiful and elegant liner – smooth-sailing and generous with the duckling bigarade.

And I can tell you that many single women on board had been stimulated by the film Titanic. Everybody was talking about the Titanic. In fact a friend who had just returned from a voyage on the Cunard Line’s QE2 reported it was the same on board that ship.

He had dined at the captain’s table and the captain told how, in the 1920s, the chairman of the Cunard Line  had dined with King George V. He had told the king “in the strictest confidence” that Cunard planned to build a liner even bigger than Titanic which had belonged to the recently bankrupted White Star Line.

The ship was to be ready in 1934 and was to be named after “the greatest queen Britain has ever had”.

Now all Cunard ships ended in “ia” - Lusitania, Mauritania and so on. The new one was to be the Victoria.

But King George thought “the greatest queen” referred to his wife, Queen Mary. He then told Mary and she  wrote a personal letter to the Cunard chairman saying how flattered she was.

Thus Cunard felt obliged to break its tradition and name its next ship the Queen Mary.

On the Symphony I met Moss Hills, cruise director, who had recently survived the sinking of two liners. Oned was the Oceanos (which the Greek captain and crew had quietly abandoned off the South African coast without warning the 600 passengers that the ship, was doomed) and the Achille Lauro which sank a couple of years later.

When Moss told me he’d twice been shipwrecked I thought I’d better pop up to the Symphony’s lifeboat deck and check the scene.

There I found notices headed HOW TO SAVE YOURSELVES. This seemed to imply that the crew would already be in the lifeboat scoffing the emergency chocolate and there’d be none of this “women and children first” nonsense.

The next line was equally enigmatic:  A SIMPLE EXERCISE TO DOUSE A BOAT TO THE WATER.

I imagined the Symphony sinking and passengers shouting “Douse the boat! For Pete’s sake, somebody douse the bloody boat!” And everybody wondering what “douse” meant.

I  read on in increasing wonderment:

Rule 1: Release the gripes.

(Panic again: “The gripes! Somebody release the gripes!”

“Gripes? What are gripes?”

A helpful passenger pushes his way down the seething Grand Staircase to the ship’s library and grabs a dictionary. He then fights his way back up to the lifeboat deck and starts to read aloud to the anguished assembly… “Gripe (verb) – to complain; gripe (noun) – sudden intestinal pain; gripe (noun) – firm grip; gripe (verb) – to come into the wind despite the helm; gripe (noun) – Australian grape…”

They throw him overboard.

Rule 2: Lift the brake lever … “Brake? Lifeboats have brakes!”

Rule 3: Strech (sic) the frappping lines … loosen the fricing lines and embark in an odely (sic) way. “Somebody frice the mainbrace!” “Who’s made that terrible oder?”

Rule 4: Loosen the frapping lines. Lift the brake lever … (”For Pete’s sake, somebody, frap the FRIPPING lines. I mean flip the flapping lines!”)

Rule 5: Loose left purchase … rove away using the floating anchor. (”Anchors FLOAT?”)

“Frop!” “Frap!” – the sound of people leaping over the side.

The notices were taken down soon after I wrote about them and were replaced by smaller ones. The new ones bore an illustration that looked like a web spun by a spider on Ecstasy.  It had but three words: “Release the gripes“.

I have since often wondered, at what stage in a shipping disaster do passengers become souls?

When ships sink the papers never say so many passengers died. They say so many “souls were lost” or so many “souls perished”. But when an aircraft crashes or a bus goes over a mountain side passengers just die and that’s that.

In order to become a soul, I suppose, you first have to come to gripes with a lifeboat.