Cruising

By the early 1970s Barney had a travel company, INTRAV, that was filling airplanes with well-heeled Americans and flying them around the world. What he didn't have was ships to put them on when they got there. He could keep chartering other people's vessels, or he could build his own. Being Barney, he built his own. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” he shrugged, “and in this case, I needed ships for my passengers.” In 1972 he started what he liked to call the first Mediterranean cruise line: Royal Cruise Line.

“I Might As Well Just Build a New Ship”

The plan, at first, was modest — buy an old ocean liner and fix it up. Then the estimates started climbing. Four million dollars to convert her. Then eight. Then twelve. Somewhere around twelve, Barney did the arithmetic that only Barney would do and announced: “For this money, I might as well just build a new ship.” So he did.

Here is the part that tells you who he was. Barney had never borrowed a penny in his life. “I didn't have a credit card, and I had never borrowed a penny. Zero,” he wrote. “I bought all of my houses and cars with cash. If I didn't have the money for something, I didn't buy it.” The new ship cost twenty million dollars. Four million was his; the other sixteen he borrowed, guaranteed by the Danish government — the first loan of his entire life. A friend clapped him on the back: “You might as well start with a big bang.”

And then came the chutzpah. Barney had noticed that the two lines he admired — Royal Caribbean and the deluxe new Royal Viking — both ran white, yacht-like ships with a blue stripe, drawn by the same Copenhagen naval architect, Knud E. Hansen. So Barney rang up Hansen and ordered a white ship with a blue stripe. He named his company Royal Cruise Line. And then, for good measure, he rented offices in the building right next door to Royal Viking.

His whole case for the venture fit in one sentence: “If Royal Caribbean can market a two-week Caribbean cruise from California, I can do a two-week Mediterranean cruise. Mine's a better deal than theirs.”

He didn't do the sea part alone. The ships and the maritime side came through a Greek partner, the shipping magnate Pericles Panagopoulos — Barney ran the marketing and the passengers, Panagopoulos the shipyards and the Greek crews. Their partnership would outlast Royal Cruise Line: Panagopoulos went on to found Superfast Ferries and the deluxe Celebrity Cruises, and died in 2019 at eighty-three — the same age Barney had reached the year before.

The Golden Odyssey

The ship was built at the Helsingør shipyard in Denmark — Elsinore, the very battlements where Hamlet saw his father's ghost — and she came into service in 1974 as the Golden Odyssey. She was small and jewel-like: about 6,800 tons, a Greek crew of some 225, and room for roughly 450 passengers, which was not an accident. Four hundred and fifty was exactly one Boeing 747's worth of people. Barney would fly a jumbo jet of Americans across the Atlantic and pour them straight onto his own ship. For the whole first year, INTRAV chartered the Golden Odyssey outright. “Every two weeks, we took a 747 load on a Mediterranean cruise starting at $898,” he remembered. She was an instant success.

She was, in the biographer's fond phrase, Barney Ebsworth in nautical form: quietly excellent, deliberately intimate, small enough that you learned the bartender's name by the second night, and utterly resistant to the vulgar pull of more. Which is worth remembering, because the whole industry was about to go the other way.

A Fleet of Three

Under Barney, Royal Cruise Line ran three ships he thought of as his own. After the Golden Odyssey came the larger Royal Odyssey in 1982, carrying some 800 guests on longer voyages — the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, the coasts of Africa. Then, in 1988, the masterpiece: the Crown Odyssey.

She cost $178 million and was built at Meyer Werft in Papenburg, Germany — and she has a lovely footnote in maritime history. She was the first cruise ship Meyer Werft ever built entirely indoors, under a vast covered dock, safe from the weather. That German trick of building ships in a shed became the industry standard; Barney's flagship was the one that started it. She ran about 34,000 tons, more than 1,200 passengers, twelve decks, and an ingenious “father-and-son” engine plant — big slow engines paired with small fast ones — so she could either cross an ocean economically or tiptoe up a Norwegian fjord.

Life Aboard

The passengers, God bless them, were not young. Royal's clientele skewed elderly, well-off, and inclined to dance — and out of that came one of the great small inventions in cruising. Barney's president, Dick Revnes, introduced polished, screened, middle-aged men to partner the single women on the dance floor. The idea, it should be said, was actually Mrs. Revnes's: she'd been on a cruise, told her husband to go dance with the women traveling alone, and one of them thanked him with tears in her eyes because she hadn't danced in years. Men who passed the screening and could truly dance sailed for free. The wags called them “geriatric gigolos.” The whole industry copied it.

Not everything ran to plan. When the ship's cruise director — a former American Episcopal priest who'd lived a decade in Greece — called to say they needed turkeys for Thanksgiving, Barney gave the go-ahead, and the Greek galley staff, eager to please, served the turkeys a week early, on the Thursday before Thanksgiving. (Years later, on a Danube cruise, the Russian crew announced they didn't know how to cook a turkey at all, and the cruise staff had to do it themselves.)

The entertainment was faded-star wattage for an audience that remembered them at full brightness. Rosemary Clooney sang, and became a real friend — she once came to Barney's birthday dinner with her niece, who sang for the table. Barney's favorite coda to that story: when a young George Clooney first turned up in Hollywood, he introduced himself as “Rosemary's nephew” — and then, once he was the famous one, Rosemary cheerfully started calling herself “George's aunt.”

Barney understood that on a small ship the crew is the product. His cruise director, a Portuguese gentleman with a fourteen-word name — Fernando Duarte Nunu Batista Canillas Tarrapa Barrosa de Oliveira — had, per Cruise Travel magazine, an “uncanny ability to remember names” and knew every passenger's by the second day. Barney trained his own agents the same way. There was a woman named Grace from Des Moines who traveled with him thirty-eight times over twenty years; the agents were coached to answer her call with, “Is this Grace from Des Moines? You just got back from South America, didn't you?”

When a needling friend suggested his trips were killing his elderly clients off, Barney had his accountant actually run the numbers. Average passenger age: seventy-two. Deaths per two-week sailing: comfortably below the statistical norm. “Oh!” said the friend. “Then you're keeping them alive.” “Well, not exactly,” Barney admitted. “Sick people don't normally take trips.”

As for the crew's private lives, Barney had a two-part orientation speech he delivered with a straight face every season:

The real rule underneath the joke: party six hours a night if you like, as long as you show up for another twelve-hour day with a smile.

The $2-Billion Lawsuit

Not all of it was funny. In March 1977, two 747s collided in fog on the runway at Tenerife — still the deadliest accident in aviation history. The Pan Am passengers had been on their way to a Royal Cruise Line sailing, and so, when the lawsuits came, Royal was named alongside Boeing, Pan Am, KLM, and the Spanish government in what was then called the biggest suit in history: two billion dollars. Barney had nothing whatever to do with the crash. It still took three months to get his company released from the case. “Seeing the images of the wreckage on television,” he wrote, “were the lowest moments I can remember.”

Clipper Cruise Line — Small Ships, Big Places

In 1981, nine years after Royal, Barney did the whole thing again — only this time he aimed smaller. Clipper Cruise Line was his alone, no Greek partner, headquartered in St. Louis. Where the rest of the industry was chasing tonnage, Barney built deluxe little exploring ships of 100 to 140 passengers that could nose into places the floating cities couldn't. Condé Nast Traveler named Clipper one of the ten best cruise lines in the world, which was faintly absurd for a company that carried so few people — and exactly the point.

The fleet grew to five: the Newport Clipper and Nantucket Clipper, both built — wonderfully — at a barge yard in Jeffersonville, Indiana, making them two of the only premium cruise ships ever launched in the American Midwest; the shallow-draft Yorktown Clipper, which drew so little water she could slip into coves the megaships couldn't dream of; the ice-hardened Clipper Adventurer; and the Pacific yacht-cruiser Clipper Odyssey. On the small ships the lounge acts were replaced by marine biologists and geologists, and in winter three of them ran the Virgin Islands, dropping anchor in coves too small for anyone else.

The Clipper Adventurer was the adventurer of the bunch — a former Soviet vessel with a genuine ice-hardened hull, rebuilt for about $13 million. She carried passengers on fifteen- to twenty-three-day expeditions across the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula, close enough to sit among the penguin colonies; in the other hemisphere she pushed to within 155 miles of the magnetic North Pole. This was expedition cruising before the phrase existed — Barney, once again, ahead of the field.

Selling Royal, Keeping Clipper

By the late 1980s the water was changing under him. To stay competitive, ships had to become enormous — climbing walls, ice rinks, four simultaneous floor shows, casinos out of Las Vegas. That was never Barney's business.

In November 1989 he sold Royal Cruise Line — all three ships — to Kloster, the Norwegian parent of Norwegian Cruise Line, for a sum that has been reported anywhere from $225 to $300 million. They eventually folded the Royal brand and scattered its ships. Clipper he kept a while longer, selling it to INTRAV in 1997.

He never pretended it was luck. “The ships were too small to make a great profit,” he said of Clipper, “but we were the only small cruise company making any money, and it all had to do with marketing. To make it in the small-ship business, you had to market like crazy. That, of course, was my specialty.” When a friend told him he must be a business genius, Barney waved it off: “No — if I had done it the first time, I would have been a business genius.”

Where the Ships Are Now

Most of Barney's fleet is still out there, scattered across the oceans under other names. The flagship Crown Odyssey sails to this day as the Balmoral — the grand old lady of Britain's Fred Olsen line, and now the oldest ship in it — still carrying passengers through the Norwegian fjords nearly forty years after Meyer Werft floated her out of that covered shed. The little Clippers, built to slip into small places, are still doing exactly that: the Newport Clipper works the Alaskan coast as UnCruise's Safari Endeavour; the ice-hardened Clipper Adventurer, now the Expedition, still pushes into the Arctic ice off Svalbard; and the Clipper Odyssey cruises the Canary Islands and Corsica as CroisiEurope's La Belle des Océans.

Not all of them found soft landings. The very first ship, the Golden Odyssey — after a half-dozen names and a stretch as an Asian casino boat — was run permanently aground on a beach in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, and turned into a stationary hotel: retired, but not scrapped. The second Royal ship, the Royal Odyssey, was less lucky — under tow to an Indian scrapyard in 2001, she took on water and sank off the coast of South Africa. The Nantucket Clipper — latterly the Chichagof Dream — has lain quiet in Sitka, Alaska, since her operator folded in early 2026, and the shallow-draft Yorktown Clipper, renamed Americana, has waited years for a buyer in a Florida backwater. But more than half the fleet is still afloat and working, decades on — and Barney, who never had much use for a thing that wasn't useful, would have liked that.

Two cruise lines, built from nothing, a decade apart. And yet for all the ships and all the sea miles, when you asked Barney where he'd rather be, the answer never changed. “As for me,” he said, “I'll still take Paris every time.”