Travellers' Checks | Viking’s ‘first’ round-the-world cruise – neither the first nor round-the-world

OLD NEWS A strange item in the news section of the Lonely Planet website caught my eye recently. “New in Travel: first ever round-the-world cruise will visit 35 countries in 141 days”, announced the headline. “It sounds like a Jules Verne novel,” began the article beneath, “but the first-ever round-the-world cruise is now actually a reality” – as if such a journey had hitherto only been the stuff of outlandish fiction.

Had I missed something? Perhaps some obscure technicality had rendered every round-the-world cruise since the RMS Laconia’s luxury circumnavigation of 1922-23 officially invalid.

A quick look at the website of Viking Cruises – the operator of this “sensational trip” – and all was revealed: “Join Viking on our first-ever world cruise”. My italics, of course. And, also unnoticed by the Lonely Planet newshound, the cruise ends in London, before the transatlantic crossing required to make it a round-the-world journey.

Although quite unremarkable these days, the first actual round-the-world cruise made more accur­ate headlines while it was under way for 130 days, from November 1922. Cunard’s RMS Laconia (above) had been chartered by the American Express Company, and sailed with most­ly American passengers and British crew from New York. In mid-January, the cruise stopped for a few days in Hong Kong (where one passenger died from pneumonia) before steaming down to Singapore via Manila and Jakarta, which was then known as Batavia.

An article in the January 30, 1923 edition of the Malaya Tribune marvelled at the American tourists’ prodigious spending habits. “Besides the usual quantity of silks and satins, lacquer and china and damascene, pottery and rugs and furniture,” it reported, “the Laconia party left Batavia with twelve show puppies, six parrots, ten cages, each of which contains from two to six love birds, all manner of song birds, six monkeys, and a pair of Pomeranians [...] one man in the party bought the batik trousers that his chauffeur was wearing, and the garment was delivered on the spot.”