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You don’t expect Cruise Ships to be stranded at sea. Nor do you expect their holiday passengers to be calling for help. Who would ever have thought that those floating hotels would become the last place on the planet you wanted to be! Yet as the Coronavirus took hold and cases began to show up on ships — suddenly everybody wanted off! And not a harbour was open.

In mid-March, the MSMarina was carrying Art Eggleton, Canada’s former minister of defence and international trade. He sent a personal SOS to Ottawa: “We’re stranded at sea!… We were supposed to dock at Lima, … then Valparaiso, Chile. But all the harbours are closed.”

By month end, it sounded much worse: “Thousands Aboard Cruise Ships Still Seeking a Port to Accept Them!” Holland America’s MS Zaandam discovered symptoms of Covid19 somewhere between Buenos Aires and San Antonio Chile. When it arrived, with its 1,243 passengers, their destination harbour would not let them dock.

A similar situation faced the MS Marina, which also left Buenos Aires and was to end in Lima Peru. After cruising back and forth seeking a port, it finally managed to dock in Miami. The MS Maasdam headed for Hawaii only to be denied entry. The Costa Pacifica was denied entry in France and Spain, but was allowed to dock at Genoa, Italy. Le Boreal, with 220 mostly french nationals, tried to dock in Brazil after being turned down by Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. The Diamond Princess was stuck at sea off the Seychelles with coronavirus cases reported onboard. The MS Braemar was stranded in the Bahamas. All told, by month end, about 25 of the big ships were still stranded at sea — all seeking an open harbour that would let their weary passengers disembark!

Dozens of ships looking for harbour! They brought to mind other vessels, human vessels like Willy Loman, that “little boat looking for a harbor” in Arthur Miller’s play, which we read in high school, Death of a Salesman. Willy’s wife, Linda, shares his tendency toward false optimism and believes Willy will get a New York job that she urged him to ask for. She also continues to believe that their son, Biff, can be more charitable towards his father: “And have a nice time with Dad,” she says. “He may have big news too! . . . That’s right, a New York job. And be sweet to him tonight, dear. Be loving to him. Because he’s only a little boat looking for a harbor.”

Other such vessels would include Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. What a plaintive cry he raises in the futile search for Captain Ahab’s white whale! What wind-swept weariness lies behind his searching question: “Where lies the final harbour whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary?”

Then there is Melville’s 19th Century contemporary, poet Walt Whitman, who described the human quest as a spider seeking an anchor for its web, in “measureless oceans of space” —
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul
(‘A Noiseless Patient Spider,’ 1854).

Happily for such searching vessels, there is a harbour that is open. Another poem of 19th Century America is like a lighthouse beaming through the night. Henry L. Gilmour’s “Haven of Rest” (1890) would become one of the world’s most-loved hymns. For our Covid-stricken world, never more storm-tossed and weary, it carries a most inviting, timeless call:

“My soul in sad exile was out on life’s sea
So burdened with sin and distressed,
Till I heard a sweet voice saying, ‘Make me your choice’
And I entered the haven of rest.
I’ve anchored my soul in the haven of rest
I’ll sail the wild seas no more.
The tempest may sweep o’er the wide stormy deep
In Jesus I’m safe evermore.”