Ferryboats began evacuating 1,800 passengers from the Queen Elizabeth 2 on Saturday after the luxury liner ran aground off the southern coast of Massachusetts and damaged the hull.
No one was reported injured, and the Coast Guard said the ship was not in danger of sinking.
The 963-foot Cunard Line flagship, with 1,000 crew members, was bound for New York on the last leg of a five-day North Atlantic cruise when it struck what was believed by the Coast Guard to be an undersea ledge at 10:20 p.m. EDT Friday.
The liner grounded in an area of treacherous sand bars and rocks not far from where the Italian liner Andrea Doria sank with a loss of 43 lives in 1956 after being rammed by the Swedish liner Stockholm.
The cause of the grounding is unclear and will be investigated. Sailors familiar with the area said that because there were so many islands and strong currents through narrow channels between them, navigation errors are common.
As is customary in coastal waters, a local pilot-and not a member of the ship`s largely British crew-was at the wheel at the time, the Coast Guard said.
While the Coast Guard said there was no apparent danger for the passengers and crew, a general evacuation was ordered.
The passengers, many of whom partied through the night as the drama unfolded, were being ferried to Newport and sent by train from Providence to New York.
The evacuation, held up for several hours while divers inspected the hull damage, began at midafternoon Saturday as 570 passengers boarded the first of about a dozen ferryboats that had been circling the QE2.
