Standing on an outside bridge wing of the Holland America Line cruise ship Westerdam, Capt. Johannes Richardus Maria Van Biljouw, a bearded 250-pound giant of a sailor, deftly eases his 54,000-ton ship into harbor.
Because the weather is good he has dispensed with the services of a tug, saving his company $2,000, and is maneuvering solely with steering engines called bow-thrusters and twin rudders and propellers.
A construction barge looms where it’s not supposed to be, blocking the channel. The captain brings the ship to a stop as quickly as he can, no mean feat with a sudden breeze pushing on the huge ship’s bulk-the Westerdam is nearly two city blocks long and a football field high and wide.
“What are you doing?” the angry Puerto Rican pilot at Van Biljouw’s side shouts to the barge over his hand-held radio. “You don’t have permission to be there! The wind’s coming up, and we can’t hold here very long.”
But if there is one thing the captain has learned in his 30 years with Holland America, it is not to show emotion in times of stress.
“If you lose your cool you get everybody around you disturbed,” he says.
He holds the behemoth in place until a tug pushes the errant barge out of the way. The passengers standing a few feet above the bridge railing aren’t even aware of the skill he has displayed.
Now 50, Van Biljouw learned such skills after growing up in the Netherlands, attending a nautical academy in Amsterdam and serving on a succession of Holland America ships. He began as an apprentice officer on a 12-passenger freighter that carried cargo from Europe to United States gulf ports, graduating to seven round-the-world voyages on cruise ships and slowly moving up to chief officer in 1979 and finally captain three years ago.
Aboard the Westerdam he is mayor, judge, civic greeter and discipliner of a floating town with nearly 1,500 passengers, 620 crew, an emergency room doctor and small hospital, several restaurants, a movie theater, a shopping center, public utilities and a health club.
“If you’re captain of a cruise ship you have to like people; if you don’t like people you should become captain of a tanker,” says Van Biljouw, who cheerfully performs chores others might find onerous, shaking every passenger’s hand, some several times, at a series of cocktail parties.
He also has to be the genial host at the captain’s table for two dinners during a weeklong cruise.
“The table holds eight, and I invite VIP passengers that the company has designated or occupants of luxury suites,” he says. “I also ask the maitre d’ to look out for twinkling ladies who are nice and invite them and their husbands.” The captain’s wife of 27 years, Margaret, is table hostess during the three months she spends aboard in the course of a year.
But the captain also has to deal with problems, such as the death of a passenger or illness that might require summoning a helicopter to lift a stretcher off the deck.
Passengers who fail to return to the ship on time when it sails from ports-of-call also pose problems.
“Pulling out of Funchal, Madeira, we saw a speedboat hurrying after us with a woman in her 60s waving frantically,” the captain recalls. “She had missed the ship. It was too rough to pick her up so we shouted for her to have our shore agent fly her to our next port, Alicante, in Spain. But the seas were too high to take passengers ashore in our tender so we had to deviate to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands.
“That’s the way it went for two weeks, and when she finally boarded in Villefranche, France, we thought she’d be very angry. But she was carrying two new suitcases stuffed with fashionable clothes that our agents had bought her and was flushed with pleasure over all her adventures and the elegant lunches and dinners the agents had bought her in so many places.”
Challenges can arise at any moment, he recalls:
“I was chief officer of the Nieuw Amsterdam on her maiden voyage in 1983 from Le Havre to New York when two stowaways from Ghana were discovered hiding in a 50-foot tender, living on the emergency food and water aboard. One was captured, but the other leaped atop the tender, which hangs 100 feet above the water, and started swinging a big iron bar at the deckhands trying to grab him.
“For a sailor I’m terribly afraid of heights, but I jumped on top of the tender, ducked the swinging iron bar and managed to handcuff the stowaway and lower him to the deck by his hair. As if this wasn’t enough trouble, the stowaways managed to escape from the brig, and one of them leaped into the Hudson River just as we were docking at Pier 40. We had to lower a lifeboat into the water and recapture him. The newspapers wrote all about the stowaways instead of our inaugural voyage.”
At sea, the captain is called to the bridge when entering and leaving port or in the event of bad weather, a fire, breakdown or other emergency. He also must be a businessman, calculating whether it would be less expensive to burn fuel to distill fresh water from sea water or pay for water at the dock. And when the itinerary permits he must hold down costs by ordering slower speeds to conserve fuel and dispense with a tugboat when it is safe to do so.
Aboard ship for 3 1/2 months at a time, Van Biljouw occupies a comfortable wood-paneled suite where, when he’s not hosting the captain’s table, he frequently dines with the chief officer and chief engineer. For recreation he sees all of the ship’s new stage shows and, when lucky, gets the radio operator to tune the ship’s satellite dish to a TV broadcast of a Dutch soccer match.
In his 2 1/2 months vacation between voyages, Van Biljuow, who spends little money at sea, lives comfortably on a salary in the $50,000-plus range.
“Our home is in the medieval Netherlands village of Vorden, and we actually have an old castle in our front yard,” he says.
The Van Biljouws have three daughters, two who serve together on a Holland America liner and another who is finishing school.
Oh, yes, don’t ask him to perform a wedding at sea.
“I can’t,” he says. “I don’t have the authority.”
