On Monday, Odyssey left the port of Belfast in Northern Ireland bound for France, Spain, Portugal, the Azores, then across the Atlantic to Bermuda and the Bahamas, and then on and on. All things being well, it will visit all seven continents, put in at 425 ports, and three and a-half years later it will have circumnavigated this wet little planet of ours. And then, god love it, it will do it again. And again. Odyssey has embarked on the cruise perpetual.
The company that runs the ship does not refer to its customers as passengers. They are residents. They live on board. These residents can choose to rent their residence for portions of the cruise perpetual, or, and this is far more interesting, buy it. And if they buy it, they own it ‘‘for the entire operational life of the ship’’. The ship as home. It is as if your house or mine, or rather your house and mine and a few dozen others, were to grow a pair of legs and set off around the world.
Inevitably, the residents are rich and, most of them, American. The article I read featured a retired wealth manager from Florida. (How very Florida to have got rich from managing riches.) The article does not specify whether she was one of Odyssey’s permanents but she is taking her Siamese cat with her, which suggests she may be. And if so, let’s consider the life she’s embarked on.
First up it is an evolutionary reversal. Our distant ancestors hauled themselves out the sea, swapped fins for limbs, ditched their gills and learned to breathe air. We’ve been creatures of the land ever since. The land is home. We walk about on it, and are free to shift ourselves across great swathes of it. Odyssey’s residents have renounced that freedom. They have voluntarily restricted themselves to a few hundred square metres of their native element. It’s like goldfish opting for the tank.
Theirs is a paradoxical situation. They have gained the globe, but tied themselves to a patch of turf smaller than a short suburban street. They are taken everywhere, yet they can independently go nowhere. The price they’ve paid for freedom is captivity.
The superficial appeal of Odyssey is obvious. We most of us like travel, or at least the thought of travel. We thrill to the idea of the exotic. But the exotic is scary and unpredictable, and getting there is harrowing work. Home, in contrast, is familiar and safe. How attractive then to make home do the travelling, to go without ever leaving.
Odyssey offers a refuge from a threatening world, and that’s always been attractive to the rich. They fear that the world will take their wealth from them, so they withdraw from it. They build castles with moats. They huddle in gated communities. Odyssey is a floating gated community. Its moat is all the world’s oceans. Within its cabins the pampered rich are sheltered from the vagaries of life, insulated by salt water. I hope they have a nice time. But I wouldn’t bank on it.
The ship is named after Homer’s Odyssey, which tells the story of a 10-year journey. But that journey has a destination. Odysseus and his men are trying to get home from the Trojan war, because home is where they belong. There is peril to be met along the way, but as Homer knew 3000 years ago, the point of peril is not to shrink from it aboard some idle boat, but to face up to it.
At one point they visit the island of the lotos-eaters, where the crew feed on the narcotic fruit and are overcome by lassitude and luxury. Only the hero Odysseus can see that this is fatal. He drags his men away by force, because the crew need more than idle luxury. They need purpose. They need to get where they belong. They need home.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
