Semester at Sea, Columbus and the Azores

The MV Explorer left Halifax on June 16 for this summer’s Semester at Sea voyage to the Mediterranean. While on the way to their first port stop of Cadiz, Spain, the ship and its 720 students passed between the outpost islands of Corvo and Flores in the Azores late in the afternoon of Sunday, June 21.

What they probably didn’t realize was that in February of 1493, in these very same waters, Christopher Columbus made his first land fall on the return trip from his first voyage to the New World.

He had left Hispaniola (present day Haiti/Dominican Republic) on January 15 on a northeasterly course that would take his dinky-little 67 foot-long caravel into the unexplored vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. In contrast, the MV Explorer is 590 feet in length … and the MV Explorer, despite its size, looks tiny when docked next to most cruise ships!

After three weeks of sailing, and watching Polaris rise higher and higher in the night sky, Columbus reckoned that he was in the proper latitude and swung the Niña — the caravel that he took command of after the Santa Maria sank — to the east. He nailed the Azores spot-on eleven days later.

When Columbus swung the Niña around to the east he noted in his log that he thought Flores was still to his north. This is 1493. The island of Flores wasn’t discovered by the Portuguese inhabitants of the Azores until 1450, and yet Columbus had detailed charts of the various islands of the Azores and knew where he was (more or less) relative to the islands of Corvo and Flores — they were not in the direction he wanted to go — he was looking for either São Miguel or Santa Maria, which are further to the east (and closer to his target of the European mainland).






If you’ve taken a bridge tour of the MV Explorer, then you’ve probably discovered that the captain and his crew didn’t take sightings of Polaris to reach Corvo and Flores in the Azores — they have all the benefits of modern charts, satellite technology and radar to find any spot — in any ocean, sea or river — on the planet.

The only time a Semester at Sea voyage has actually made port in the Azores was on Mar. 2, 1965, when the floating campus stopped in Porta Delgada (the capital of the Azores on São Miguel) on the “dead-head” voyage of Spring 1965 (the last of only three University of the Seven Seas “uncredited” voyages).

Some 80 students were transported on the MS Seven Seas from Los Angeles to South Hampton, so that the ship could be repositioned by the Holland American Line and returned to passenger travel. It was a dark time for the future of the Semester at Sea program in the waters of the Azores in March of 1965. These 80 students would eventually made their way to Barcelona and the Institute of North American Studies for a two-month stay before taking a bus ride to Rotterdam by way of Moscow and Berlin.

Porta Delgada is 760 nautical miles from Lisbon and going in the other direction, 2,111 nautical miles from the port of New York. If the Portuguese could sail 760 miles out into the open Atlantic Ocean, find a chain of islands, settle them and then make “routine” trips back and forth between them for some 30 years before Columbus is born, then why didn’t they, the Portuguese, discover the New World?

It is interesting that it was left to the Italian-born, Portuguese-speaking Christopher Columbus, in the service of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, to be the first to claim the honor of discovering the New World.

The First Floating Campus

Getting to the ship in Costa Rica was a walk in the park compared to getting to the ship in 1966.

I sat there in the summer of 1965 too ignorant to be overwhelmed by what it would take to get ready for 127 days at sea (the longest voyage in the history of the Semester at Sea program).

No sooner had I been accepted into the program when the newspapers were full of the MS Seven Seas breaking down in the North Atlantic some 500 miles east of St. John’s, Newfoundland (near where the Titanic went down)!

The ship was being repositioned from Europe to the United States for the Fall of 1965 voyage (the first under Chapman College’s supervision) when there was an engine fire that left her adrift with 400 passengers and a crew of 200. It took nearly a week for the helpless ship to be rescued and towed into St. John’s — unless the damage could be repaired by October 20, there would be no “campus” for the students to board.



No ship. No program. Another false start would likely end the concept of a Semester at Sea program. It would be just a memory.

In the meantime, the Holland American line sent along a list of things that needed to get done before I would be allowed to board the ship. A passport was needed and a laundry list of vaccinations — that included Yellow Fever — would need to be dealt with before I could leave the country.

And then there was the clothing and luggage list. Two military-style footlockers would be allowed on board. One for the cabin and the other would be in storage that could be accessed at various times during the voyage.

I would need a suit for in-port visits (I’m thinking something casual to get around in and they are looking at us being formal ambassadors to each country we visit). Interesting.

But it was that requirement for a dinner jacket that really caught my attention — for the formal events that would take place on the ship. Was this a luxury cruise or a floating campus voyage? Mixed messages. After all, this was all new — if somehow got the ship repaired (and sea-worthy), and if I survived the getting-ready gauntlet, then the Spring of 1966 voyage would be just number five in the series. So they — especially Chapman College — were feeling their way in terms of traditions.

The engines on the MS Seven Seas were on their last legs. She was slow (by any standards), but she had a proud history that included a World War II Battle Star. Before being used as a floating campus for five voyages — including four that went around the world — the MS Seven Seas was a weapon of war, not a symbol of peace, understanding and goodwill.

She was launched on January 10, 1940 as the CVE-1, the first in the series of Long Island-class escort aircraft carriers, or “pocket” carriers. They had room for just 21 planes on their little decks.



She was named the USS Long Island and was assigned to Norfolk, Virginia to train pilots in landing on carriers (how ironic it is that the current academic sponsor, the University of Virginia, would just love to use Norfolk as its base of operations, but the Jones Act of 1917 prevents them from using the port for ending and launching voyages, hence the silliness of beginning the current summer Semester at Sea voyage from Halifax in Canada).

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, sinking the battleships that were stationed there, however the carrier fleet (what there was of it) was out to sea. The Navy was not thinking in terms of the value of air power, but sea power. Battleships banging away at each other — not deadly fights between foes who would engage each other over vast distances. That thinking would change as the war unfolded.

Our carrier force in the Pacific totaled five Lexington/Hornet-class carriers at the outbreak of the war — the big boys, so to speak. However, the Lexington was sunk at the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 8, 1942, and the Yorktown went down at Midway on June 7. That left just the Hornet (the carrier made famous for the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April of 1942), Saratoga and Enterprise as the only aircraft carriers in the entire Pacific Ocean to take on the larger (and better trained) Japanese fleet.

After Pearl Harbor the USS Long Island was moved to California to continue to train new pilots for carrier takeoffs and landings. However, with the loss of the Lexington and Yorktown carriers, and with the Hornet temporarily out of action in Pearl Harbor to be refitted with new radar and gunnery systems, the Navy suddenly found that the Long Island’s tiny decks were needed at an island in the Solomon chain called Guadalcanal.

The Japanese had begun to build a long-range airfield on the island in May of 1942. This would be used as a staging area for air strikes on both New Zealand and Australia. With this alarm being sounded, nothing else in the Pacific was important now — the island must be taken from the Japanese at all costs before these bombing raids could begin.

A quickly drawn-up battle plan would have the Saratoga and Enterprise lead a vanguard of ships in support of Major General Alexander Vandegrift’s island assault by the 1st Marine Division. 11,000 Marines stormed ashore on August 7, 1942, and the life-and-death struggle for Guadalcanal began.

He quickly captured the Japanese airbase, which was renamed Henderson Field, but soon discovered that the two remaining carriers in the Pacific fleet — Saratoga and Enterprise — were moved well away the action after tangling with a superior Japanese naval force.

Stranded on Guadalcanal and without any air cover, Vandegrift’s Marines became sitting ducks for the daily air strikes being launched from Rabaul by the Japanese. The skies over Guadalcanal were filled with Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” heavy bombers and their fighter escorts, the legendary Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters.

The initial Japanese shock over the surprise Marine invasion had passed and by the 19th of August Vandegrift had grave concerns that he could continue to hold Henderson Field without air support in the face of an enemy that was three times his number. But the Navy had a plan!

On August 2 — five days before the Marine landing on Guadalcanal took place — the USS Long Island was dispatched from Hawaii with two squadrons of Marine fighters — a dozen Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers and 19 Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters — ten aircraft more than the Long Island was actually designed to carry.

In the pre-dawn darkness of August 20, 1942, the Long Island took up a position 200 miles to the south and east of Guadalcanal. From that point — over the horizon — she would launch all of her aircraft and then leave the area. The Marine pilots would either land at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, or, if Vandegrift could not hold the field, they were to ditch at sea with the vague hope of being rescued by allied ships in the area.

The 1st Marines held, and all 31 fighters landed on Guadalcanal. They were then named the “Cactus Air Force,” refueled and would immediately take to the air to wait the arrival of the daily onslaught of Japanese bombers and fighters. The Japanese quickly discovered that they no longer owned the skies over Guadalcanal … they had company.

The Hornet would supply additional aircraft four days later, but Vandegrift had his air cover and the Japanese — despite several major attempts to retake the island — would eventually concede defeat and retire from the area in November.

In the Fall of 1963, on the maiden voyage of the Semester at Sea program (then called The University of the Seven Seas), this former weapon of war — the USS Long Island — now the MS Seven Seas, would once again sail into Japanese waters. The last foreign port before returning to the United States was that of Yokohama, Japan.



21 years after engaging Japanese forces in the Solomons, the MS Seven Seas would arrive in Japan as the first of five floating campuses dedicated to peace, education and understanding. Literally the vision of Isaiah 2:4 had come to pass, “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

There was a time when changing flights in Dallas was a real nightmare. During my MGM days I would fly back east on a regular basis and if that direct flight on American Airlines in the morning out of LAX was a no-go, then it usually meant a trip through Dallas.

Since I travel with the philosophy that if you can’t carry it, you don’t need it, it always meant that I would be schlepping my carry-ons from one gate to the next to make connections. It was never, ever, from C12 to C13. The airlines don’t think like that. It was always A1 to Z83 … pick the most distant point between gates and that’s the way the American Airlines’ computer would send connecting-flight passengers. Oh yes, and you would have just 30 minutes to scamper like a rat through the maze.

So it came as a very pleasant surprise that the gate-changing hassles in Dallas have all but vanished. It was our first stop on May 22 as Judy and I made our way to San Jose, Costa Rica — through Dallas — for our two week Enrichment Voyage on the Semester at Sea’s MV Explorer.

The American Airlines’ terminal has been completely redesigned and getting from one gate — and connecting terminals — is a breeze on the racetrack shuttle train that rings the complex (you never leave security … thank god).

We easily transferred from one terminal to the next — yes, carrying our luggage in REI-designed backpack/suitcases — and still had plenty of time for a leisurely lunch at a nice Irish pub across from our boarding gate. Food good. Beer good. All good.

I was thinking about that time that this going was going to be easy. I had stressed out for nothing. Everything had been last minute, so I expected the worst, but so far … pura vida.

Last year we boarded the MV Explorer, and the two-week Enrichment Voyage in Nassau, circled the Caribbean and then returned back to Nassau to begin our trek home. This year, for a bunch of different reasons, the decision to go once again on the MV Explorer was left to very nearly the cut-off point. And, to complicate matters, the voyage this year began in Central America and finished in Fort Lauderdale. Anything that could go wrong — according to Murphy’s Law — would probably go wrong.

But there we were, having a nice lunch, with the gate in sight. Boarding was easy too. I figured with a little luck — and with well-timed connections in Costa Rica — we would be at the ship by eleven. A nightcap would follow. In bed by midnight … at the latest. A rafting trip was planned for bright and early the next morning — seven hours of sleep was in bag.

They closed the doors and we just sat there. A half-hour went past. Another. And then there was this funny announcement that the coffee pot was leaking and engineers were working on it. The coffee pot? I wouldn’t want to be at 30,000 feet with hot coffee sloshing up and down the aisles, so fixing the coffee pot seemed like a good idea. The coffee pot? Honest.

Another 30 minutes slipped by. And then another half-hour before the announcement came that all was good and we’d be on our way in no time. Twenty minutes later there was finally movement as we slowly pulled away from the gate. I made a mental note to myself — don’t ask for coffee while in flight, it might somehow screw things up. “This is your captain speaking, some knucklehead in 32C asked for coffee … brace yourselves, we will be making an emergency landing in the jungles of El Salvador.”

I avoided that mistake, so we arrived in Costa Rica in the middle of the night with our bags clinging to our backs. Getting through customs was confusing. They couldn’t make sense of all these people not staying in a local hotel or some other residence. “¿Cuál es el Explorador MV?,” the woman at the immigration counter kept asking. “¿Dónde va usted?,” with a befuddled look (and most irritated) and then waved us through (dismissed us, I think).

Suddenly we were on the sidewalk and there was a friendly Red Shirt smiling at us. It was the guy from the computer lab on last year’s voyage. We were the first through the gauntlet of local bureaucrats — who had to stay an extra two-and-a-half hours to wait for our arrival. The reason we were the first through — “if you can’t carry it, you don’t need it.”



We were handed off to two more S@S people, who checked us off a list and asked if we would just hang out and wait on the sidewalk for the rest of our fellow passengers. Pretty soon a bus pulled up and we climbed aboard.

We waited. We waited a little longer. And then we waited some more before some guy boarded the bus and informed us that four passengers were missing their luggage. What is the rule? Yes … if you can’t carry it, you don’t need it!

After awhile the bus started up and away we went. They would, as it turned out, be abandoned in San Jose in the hope that the first flight in the next day would have their missing luggage. Never did find out if they made the voyage.

Judy never said anything, but I’ll bet she was thinking how lucky we were to carry our luggage with us as backpacks. Yeah, right.

The bus ride was uneventful. After about an hour-and-a-half we spotted the MV Explorer —at the Puntarenas dock, all ablaze with some funky lights that were new to us. We filled out forms (cough, cough, no swine flu), turned in our passports and were pointed in the direction of the ship’s ladder at the other end of the dock. Boarding would be on Deck 5! As a friendly gesture for all of us “late arrivals,” the bar in the teacher’s lounge would remain open until 2 AM.

Straight to Purser’s Square where we got our pictures taken, and pass cards/room cards issued and our credit card information entered into the system. It’s a cash-less ship, you just swipe your card for drinks at the various bars and for chotzkes at the student store.

Next we dumped our luggage off in 4008 — our cabin for the voyage (forward, on the port side) — and scurried back up the stairs to deck seven and the lounge. Eight minutes before two in the morning. The day ended with “a Red Stripe, please.”

Finally Caught Up

Finally got caught up with work (sort of) after two weeks on the MV Explorer and this year's between-semester Enrichment Voyage. It took a whole week of 12 hour days to accomplish it (I guess that's the price one pays for a vacation).

This year it was Central America again and visits to Costa Rica (twice, both coasts), Nicaragua, Panama (including a transit of the canal — the third one by the MV Explorer during the month of May), Honduras (Roatan), Guatemala and Belize. Plus we zipped across the Caribbean to visit Jamaica before finishing the two-week voyage in Fort Lauderdale on Friday, June 5.

Getting home was an adventure. We cleared customs quickly. They have a great system at Fort Lauderdale. They unload the luggage directly from the ship into large metal containers with wire mesh all around them. Then the forklift driver takes it over to a place on the dock where a handler and his dog do a quick run around of the cube.

One presumes that if the dog gets a "hit," the luggage in that cube is set aside for a closer look. No problems for us, Judy had filled out the declaration and we were sent through quickly to the sidewalk and the cab line.

But the cab station was chaos (there was no order at all), however Judy managed to flag one down and as we started loading our stuff in it it suddenly occurred to me that there would be room for two more in the cab, so I turned and yelled out "anyone else going to the airport?" One of the members of the Happiness Emporium (the barbershop quartet that entertained on the ship) and his wife (oh lord, she is one funny lady) were the first to jump at it.

Away we went, with the cab drive talking and texting on the cell phone and steering the car with his knees. The barbershop guy (who had hopped in the front seat) starting having a meltdown. You could almost sense that the cab driver was going to take us to some nearby swamp and drop us off on a side road, "here's the airport, mon," but he grudgingly put the cell phone away and deposited us in front of American Airlines a few minutes later.

Our flight was not for five hours, so we gambled on stand-by on the first flight to Dallas, and got lucky. 45 minutes later we were in the air and thinking that we'd be home in time for dinner. Dallas had other plans — we spent our five hours waiting there instead.

It didn't matter. The travel hassles. The work hassles. Being back on the ship again for two weeks made it all worthwhile.

Back in 1965 I was working at Airways Rent-a-Car in the Burbank Airport and going to junior college without any real plans. I was just getting the prerequisites knocked down. You know, Health, Speech, Art History and the like. I didn't really care much about the grades — just B's and C's would do as long as I passed these courses and got them out of the way. I had a vague plan of transferring to Cal State Northridge once I got my AA.

All of that changed one Sunday night as I left Burbank Airport after the last flight in that evening (usually Lockheed guys from Sunnyvale looking to get an early start on the work week by flying in Sunday evening instead of waiting for the rush on Monday morning). I hopped in the car and headed back across the valley to my parent's home in Northridge (about 30 minutes or so) and much to my chagrin the rock and roll output on KRLA was down to accommodate the required FCC "public service" programming. In this case it was Sunday night talk. Almost turned it off. Glad I didn't.

It is amazing how a single little event like not turning the radio off on an otherwise uneventful Sunday evening can turn out to be a life-changing event.

As I rolled along the familiar path home I got caught-up in what was being said on the radio. It was these kids who had finished a semester at sea for a program called The University of the Seven Seas. It caught my imagination as they talked about going to class on the ship while going around the world — what a concept!!!

That had just finished the Fall of 1964 voyage around the world.

I pulled into the driveway, shut the engine down and listened to the rest of the program in the dark. I scrounged around for something to write on and managed to jot down a coherent address to get more information on the program. Little did I know at the time, but the dream of going to college on a ship — while seeing the world — was on its last legs.

The Spring of 1965 voyage was launched with just 80 students, who "dead-headed" the ship back to Europe (stopping in Alcapulco, Mexico, a transit of the Panama Canal, Kingston, Jamaica, Porta Delgata in the Azores and Lisbon before docking in South Hampton — four weeks at sea). They then spent the next two months at the Institute of North American Studies in Barcelona before taking a six-week bus tour of Europe. If you could say "dead in the water," that would be the standing on that winter night for a program that had caught my imagination ... just my luck.

Unaware of the status and the struggles to keep the idea of a floating university alive, I hastily sent off a request for more information to Holland American Lines the next day. A week or so later I received a brochure that described how the University of the Seven Seas was an uncredited program — you could attend classes, but would not get any college credits for your trouble.

Let me repeat that. No credit!

They had plans for Fall of 1965 and Spring of 1966 semesters. The cost was $1,690 for passage on the ship and $550 for "tuition." That seemed like a deal — five months at sea. Around the world. For just $2,240 — what difference did it make if I didn't get credit for the class work ... I was just drifting through junior college courses anyway.

I thought about it. Kicked the idea around for a few weeks and then figured that I could save the money necessary to finance it if I shot for the Spring of 1966 semester at sea. I made the request and on May 5, 1965 I was accepted into the program with the words "we are hold a reservation for you." Interesting.


Away we go, even if the students currently enrolled in the program were just leaving for that six-week bus tour of Europe. That jaunt behind the Iron Curtain would take them from Barcelona to Moscow and then to Berlin (complete with wall) and finally to Rotterdam where they boarded a passenger ship for the return trip to New York City.

No ship. No credits. But I had a "reservation" for a Feb. 10, 1966 round the world voyage. I felt like that old Groucho Marx joke, "I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." What had I done? I might well be the only member in the club on that May date in 1965 — ignorance was bliss.

But luck and fate and a little college in Orange, California with a very big vision announced on May 14, 1965 that they were taking over the program and would be giving it full accreditation. I scrambled to find out exactly where Chapman College was — founded in 1861. Disciples of Christ. Small. Private.

On July 9, I was informed that my application was accepted and that I needed to get $500.00 to the nearest branch office of Holland American Lines within 14 days if I wished to proceed with the voyage. I drove to downtown Los Angeles the next day and handed them a check in person. I was now a student at Chapman College and their Seven Seas Division.