THE Diamond Princess cruise liner has been in the headlines lately, after some passengers and crew were suspected of having the coronavirus, Covid-19. 

Ironically, many of the news reports will have been interspersed with idyllic adverts for luxurious cruising holidays. 

The Diamond Princess’s 3,711 passengers and crew were quarantined by the Japanese authorities. Passengers with confirmed cases were taken ashore for treatment. Two have died, but most have now returned to their home countries. 

This isn’t the first major medical crisis the ship has seen. In February 2016, Diamond Princess experienced a gastroenteritis outbreak caused by the norovirus. 

Some 158 passengers and crew on board were ill by the time the ship docked at Sydney.

Taking a closer look at the ship and its history, and indeed this whole cruising business, proved more difficult than I thought.

Wikipedia describes the Diamond Princess as a British ship launched in 2004. 

From then until 2014 the ship sailed under the Bermuda flag but in 2014 she was registered in London. 

It is actually owned by Carnival Corporation & plc, a joint British-US cruise operator, currently the world’s largest leisure-travel company, with a combined fleet of over 100 vessels across 10 brands – including the very British P&O and Cunard lines. 

Carnival is composed of two companies, Carnival Corporation and Carnival plc, which function as one entity.  The former is located in Miami, Florida, and the latter is listed on the London Stock Exchange.  

The Diamond Princess and its twin sister-ship, Sapphire Princess, were built in the Mitsubishi shipyards in Nagasaki, Japan. 

Diamond Princess began operation in March 2004, cruising both Asia and Australia. 

This massive company demonstrates the huge growth in cruise holidays. They offer a perceived safe way to visit exotic places, without what might be considered as the normal risks. 

You are never forced to eat exotic local food, or even go ashore if you don’t want to. 

Even early pith-helmet imperialists got closer to the local inhabitants than this.

Some cruise ships in some ports will even invite local traders aboard ship to set up a sanitised souk, kasbah, medina or other local market on the ship itself. 

Cruise passengers bring far less spend to foreign ports than those staying for a holiday. 

Cruise ships are the ultimate all-inclusive, everything-is-paid-for-before-you-board holiday. 

Benefits to locals when you dock are minimal – but they do have to deal with the waste that the cruise ship leaves behind. 

Even while you’re tied up in port, huge amounts of electricity need to be generated, causing even more emissions.

Few local jobs are created by visiting cruise ships. On most cruise ships the senior officers might be from the US or Britain, but the majority of the crew will be poorly paid and from Third World countries like the Philippines, India or Malaysia. Deck crews and engineers are often from the Baltic states.

The ships crowd out previously remote and little-visited spots such as the Galapagos Islands, which have been totally changed in character by the many cruise ships visiting. 

Cruise ships also bring invasive species to many unspoiled places.

There have been major cruise-ship collisions, some causing deaths. Some have crashed into port infrastructure, as in Venice last summer. This caused the historic city to look at banning these ships. 

Some claim that cruise ships are better for the environment than air travel. You might assume that a ship would emit less carbon dioxide than a long-haul flight but that is not the case. 

On a typical one-week voyage a cruise ship generates more than 50 tonnes of rubbish and a million gallons of grey water, 210,000 gallons of sewage and 35,000 gallons of oil-contaminated water. 

Environmental campaigner George Monbiot has calculated that sailing to New York and back on the cruise ship QEII uses almost 7.6 times as much carbon as making the same journey by plane.

The massive Diamond Princess can use four different combinations of fuel and motors to give four different levels of emissions. 

They always choose the cheapest and dirtiest drive system unless particularly prohibited by local regulations. 

These rules are mostly found off the coasts of California and Alaska. The rest of the world can look after itself.

In 2013 a sister ship, the Caribbean Princess, deliberately discharged 4,227 gallons of oil-contaminated waste off the southern English coast.  

It used a secret illegal pipe bypassing the vessel’s on-board pollution-control systems. 

A newly hired engineer took pictures of this pipe and when the ship berthed at Southampton this brave engineer turned whistleblower. 

An investigation by US authorities found that the illegal practice had been taking place on the Caribbean Princess and four other Princess ships. 

In December 2016, Princess pleaded guilty to seven charges related to illegal discharges off various coasts around the US and paid a £30.8 million penalty. 

As part of the settlement eight Carnival companies were required to operate for five years under court supervision with independent environmental audits and a court-appointed monitor.

Carnival broke this agreement, including discharging plastic into waters in the Bahamas, falsifying records and interfering with court supervision. 

When they were caught out in 2019 Carnival and Princess were ordered to pay an additional £15 million penalty.

The Diamond Princess and Sapphire Princess are the widest of cruise ships, with a beam of 123 feet (37.5m). 

Both are fatal to sleeping or slow-swimming whales and other large marine animals. 

There have been a number of cases of these ships returning to port with a huge whale carcass caught in the bulbous underwater pod at the front of the vessels, and more cases where trapped whales have been simply unhooked and dumped.

In 2010 a dead 43-foot, female humpback whale was discovered pinned to the bow of the Sapphire Princess near Juneau, Alaska.

In 2007, Princess Cruises paid over £500,000 to settle a criminal charge related to a dead whale found just outside Alaska’s Glacier Bay in 2001.

That whale, a pregnant humpback, was found to have had its skull crushed.

Although Princess did not admit in the settlement to striking the whale, the company pleaded guilty to failing to operate one of its vessels at a safe speed around whales.

No-one knows how many marine mammals are simply run down by these 25mph ships. Few whales actually end up fixed to the cruise-ship bow pods but hundreds, perhaps even thousands, are run over and killed or seriously injured.

Most just drift away or sink never to be seen again.

Friends who have been on holiday cruises tell me they usually come home with cold or flu snuffles. 

It seems that the cruise-ship business needs to come with a health warning, not just for their passengers but for the whole of our beautiful blue planet.