Cruise Ship Profiles Cruise Lines – Orient Lines – Marco Polo
Adapted from the first to earn hard currency, the ALEXANDR PUSHKIN was employed in the service of the Baltic State Steamship Company to run between Leningrad and Montreal via ports in Western Europe and Britain.
This is the ship on which I crossed the North Atlantic in 1966, not long after she entered service.
It looks like quite a big ship, but even by the standards of the 1960s, she’s quite small. The QE II, buiit in 1969, is 70,000 tons to the Pushkin/Polo’s 19,000. The Queen Mary II, slated to enter service in 2003, will be 150,000 tons.
The crossing took nine days, well off the five days taken by the France, the United States, or the QE II, but in all fairness to the Pushkin, we had further to go: we were bound up the St Lawrence to Montreal, where the others went to New York.
Why a Russian ship? As I understand it, we were planning to take a British ship from Liverpool, either the Empress of Canada or the Empress of Britain, but there was a mariners strike. We then had the choice of a Greek ship or the Pushkin.The Pushkin was designed to service Western travelers, and was there to fill the gap. As it turned out ,the Pushkin was full while the Greek ship, which arrived in Montreal while we were docked there, was crowded. I was a mere lad of four, but by all accounts, I enjoyed shipboard lfe immensely, suffering from seasickness only once, and then I was joined by pretty much everyone else, it was that bad. The North Atlantic is not known for its placid waters, after all.
So what else can Google find for me, I wonder? This took about three tries in as many minutes, and the key was dropping “Alexandr” since it has so many spelling variants.
Looking up these details is taking up all kinds of time: it’s just fascinating. All the names of the ships and the old steamship companies . . it’s as addictive as map reading.