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dancing was cancelled. However the national mourning is now over and people feel a little more
free.”

As I take a leisurely bath (tubs are standard in most Zuiderdam staterooms; a real luxury on a

modern cruise ship) and blow-dry my hair in air-conditioned comfort, I consider what it must have
been like for 30s passengers at the mercy of the heat in a much smaller ship without stabilisers or
ensuite bathrooms. Just two days out of the Canaries my grandmother wrote that it was too hot to sit
in the dining room. “After tea I felt my first taste of giddiness. It was not nice. I bathed Tony in such

a hot room with no air and I suppose the steam just finished me.”

Within another four days most passengers had given up dancing because of the heat, and later,

berthed at Cristobal in the then American-run Panama Canal Zone, her cabin had become an oven.
“We spent the most terrible night I can ever remember. We had an electric fan going all night and
everyone felt on the verge of collapsing. One could not possibly sleep. This tropical heat cannot be
understood unless one has experienced it.”

The extraordinary feat of human endeavour that finally linked the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across
Panama was the highlight of my grandmother’s day.

She wrote, “We went to the army quarters (American). They protect the place five miles either side of
the canal. Their houses are fine and the place is beautifully kept … it really is a most wonderful thing,

this Panama Canal, when one sees and hears what had to be contended with while it was under