Cruise Ships
by Gary Bannerman
Vancouver has become one of the most significant ports in the passenger-shipping world, home base for what is the industry’s most profitable market on a per-passenger basis.
In a mass movement of people and ships not seen since the Klondike Gold Rush of a century ago, vacationers, predominantly Americans, sail the Inside Passage of British Columbia each summer to the 50th state.
Some of the largest and most luxurious ships afloat make Vancouver a regular port of call between May and October. In 1995, 25 different ships made over 270 separate sailings, carrying more than 600,000 passengers. They collectively spent $140 million in Canada. The economic impact, measured in provisions, ship servicing, employment and other spin-offs may be double that amount.
Passenger travel along the coast has been a factor of every chapter of British Columbia history. Vessels owned by Canadian Pacific, Canadian National Railway, Union Steamship Company and other competitors have worked the British Columbia-Alaska trade.
Several of Canadian Pacific’s renowned and beloved White Empresses were based here, postcard sights as they made their way through First Narrows. This evolved in later years into a CP partnership with Union Steamships of New Zealand, marketed as The Australasian Line, transporting passengers and cargo from Vancouver to the Orient.
But Vancouver was never a major port of the world passenger liner business. Immigrant ships of all shapes and sizes occasionally stopped here. During World War II several of the passenger ships conscripted into troop-carrying modes went into B.C. yards for refit. One of these was the original Queen Elizabeth, in her dull naval grey, which dropped anchor in English Bay en route to Yarrows Shipyard in Victoria.
In 1954, when the Orient Line included Vancouver in a pioneering Pacific itinerary with the ships Oronsay, Orcades and Orsova, a new era dawned. The British giant P&O Lines, which would ultimately absorb the Orient Line, began its association with the arrival of Himalaya in 1958.
This occurred amidst the death throes of pan-oceanic passenger shipping, as the great lines tried to compete with aircraft. Many famous corporate names disappeared during the 1960s. Venerable firms such as P&O, Cunard and Holland America flirted with vacation travel and managed to survive, but the modern cruise industry was the creation of newcomers.
One of these was a Canadian-born Seattle businessman, Stan McDonald, who had developed a taste for cruising with a charter ship serving the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.
Following that event, McDonald looked for another ship. He was aware that Canadian Pacific’s small coastal steamer Princess Patricia, although busy each summer from Vancouver to Alaska, was idle in the winter. He chartered her for two seasons, the first Mexican Riviera cruises from Los Angeles. Princess Patricia lent her name to what would become one of passenger shipping’s most famous firms, Princess Cruises.
McDonald chartered two larger Italian ships in 1966 and set about building his company to serve Alaska in the summer, Mexico in the winter, At first, he competed only with the small Canadian railway ships, but he soon attracted company.
P&O diverted 28,000-ton Arcadia into seasonal Alaska service. When McDonald acquired the 20,000-ton Island Princess, majestic by 1970 standards, P&O responded by purchasing a 17,000-ton Scandinavian vessel, and called her Spirit of London (subsequently renamed Sun Princess), the first purpose-built cruise ship ever to enter the fleet. Holland America, the historic Dutch firm, and the super-luxury fleet of Royal Viking Line came next.
The Port of Vancouver processed 22,800 cruise passengers in 1971. The total passed 170,000 in 1981; 423,000 in 1991 and a staggering total of 600,000 in 1995.
Canada Place, a cruise port, hotel, office and convention centre complex, was built in advance of the Expo 86 world fair. The five sails have become the most identifiable landmark on Canada’s West Coast. The facility’s ocean terminal was designed to handle as many as five ships at a time but when Canada Place opened in 1986, it faced a difficult reality: the average cruise ship had doubled in size and even bigger ones were planned. The modern port could often serve only two of these new giants at any one time. While 20,000-ton vessels were still dominant in 1980, a few ships in the 70,000-ton range now make Vancouver their summer home.
Ballantyne Pier, a cargo terminal in Vancouver’s East End, was temporarily put into service for cruise passengers in 1983. It has been in continuous service ever since. The Port of Vancouver recently invested $46 million to give it permanent life as a convertible facility for pulp and paper products in the winter and cruise ship passengers in the summer.
The Port of Vancouver expects to serve more than one million passengers a year by the turn of the century, a volume that would require additional terminal capacity.
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