Once or twice a year, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman boards a luxury cruise ship for a working vacation. She spent most of last month in the waters off Iceland and Britain, enjoying the same privileges as passengers who paid full fares in the thousands of dollars.
But it’s not all champagne and shuffleboard: Ms. Hoffman is not paid and must write and present four lectures that are informative, interesting, and relevant to the cruise itinerary. Though she is an American historian by training, she has lectured off the coasts of France on romantic love, Italy on Garibaldi, Peru on the Incas, and Australia on aborigines—all topics that she had to bone up on before she could teach them. For this month’s trip, aboard the Silversea Cruises vessel Silver Cloud, she gave talks on Vikings, druids, and Celts.
“Basically I can go anywhere I want in the world,” says Ms. Hoffman, a history professor at San Diego State University, as long as a cruise ship is headed there, and the guest historian’s slot hasn’t been claimed. “It’s completely whim-driven.”
She has tried to recruit colleagues to her hobby, with few successes: “They’ll say, ‘Oh no, I don’t have time for that.’” They don’t know what they’re missing. Scholars who work the cruise-ship circuit generally travel free or pay a token fee to a booking agency. They also broaden their own knowledge and get students who actually want to hear them talk. “It’s great fun to lecture to people who are not shuffling in their chains,” she says. “They’re in the audience only because that is exactly where they want to be in the universe.” Most of them are well heeled, well informed, and curious about the world, says Ms. Hoffman, who has formed some lifelong friendships with people she has met on ships.
One fellow academic she did manage to bring on board is Carolyn Dudek, an associate professor of political science at Hofstra University. The two women met at a seminar, and Ms. Hoffman sized up Ms. Dudek as a likely candidate for a cruise. She already had her sea legs, having done a couple of tours with Semester at Sea, and as a scholar of comparative European-Latin American politics she was a nimble lecturer.
“A lot of political scientists focus on just one country,” says Ms. Dudek. “I’m kind of all over the place.”
Ms. Dudek connected with Silversea officials, who booked her for a 16-day, six-lecture cruise last December and January from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Valparaiso, Chile, aboard the Silver Whisper. Her husband joined her, and the couple traveled free, save for the cost of his flights.
The vessel stopped in the Falkland Islands, so Ms. Dudek read up on the 1982 war between Britain and Argentina, and prepared a lecture with maps and photos of the islands. A famous description of the war by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges served as her title: “Two Bald Guys Fighting Over a Comb: The Falkland Islands War.”
“To be perfectly honest, I knew the basic facts about the Falkland Islands war, but I didn’t know much detail,” particularly on the British side, she says. The passengers, by contrast, who included a lot of Brits, “had very specific views on that war.”
She concluded from her research that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had led her country to war to overcome her low approval ratings. “It was a way for her to stay in power,” Ms. Dudek says, a view that could have incensed some partisans but that she said actually prompted “a good debate” and “really intriguing questions.”
The next day, after spending a few hours ashore in the Falkland Islands capital of Stanley, several passengers told her that her lesson had enriched their experience by providing perspective. And the positive evaluations her audiences submitted to the cruise line led Silversea officials to invite Ms. Dudek back, for a 17-day sail this December from Valparaiso to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
A Storm on Board
Political discussions on the high seas aren’t always as genial as the ones Ms. Dudek led, and passengers’ moods, like marine weather conditions, can quickly deteriorate.
Nicholas Southey—who lectured on history, culture, and politics for three summers off Africa’s east coast in the Indian Ocean—recalls how he once unwittingly caused a tempest with a passing reference to Tony Blair: The audience was largely British and “quite conservative,” says Mr. Southey, a senior lecturer in history at the University of South Africa, but one couple, a retired schoolteacher and his wife, “had strong Labour Party leanings.” Mr. Southey had observed that the prime minister was a proponent of a strong British commitment to Africa, prompting the schoolteacher to rise after the lecture with a question about that point.
“The way he put it annoyed somebody in the back who stood up before I could answer,” says Mr. Southey, “and suddenly before I knew where we were going, a great big row was flinging around the room between about four people. That was a bit of a tense moment.”
No punches were thrown, he says, but over the next couple of days several passengers of the ship confided their sympathy: “Pity about that incident,” Mr. Southey says they told him. “It was nothing to do with you. It was all about that obnoxious man and his horrible wife.”
Mr. Southey shared lecturing duties with an ornithologist, a marine biologist, and a handful of other experts aboard the 105-passenger Island Sky, which was marketed as a comfortable English country hotel-at-sea. Such small vessels are “quite contained environments,” he says, noting that it was not unusual for cliques to form during the ship’s two-week trips, and for petty disputes between passengers to swell into bigger ones.
“Part of my job was just to smile serenely and sweetly and try not to alienate anybody at all,” he says.
The other, larger part of his job was lecturing on topics like African underdevelopment to generally wealthy, well-traveled retirees who had paid upward of $7,000 apiece for a 14-day cruise and now simply wanted to understand why the residents of the continent were so poor. Mr. Southey says he always resisted the urge to deliver “raves against colonialism” or make Marxist analogies, and instead strived to offer a range of perspectives on Africa’s challenges. His audiences, he says, generally listened with sincere interest.
One of his most popular lectures was on the Indian Ocean pirates of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The ship’s crew members, unbeknownst to the passengers, were more concerned about present-day pirates. By 2008, Mr. Southey says, such gangsters were venturing beyond the lawless waters off Somalia and down along Africa’s east coast. To his disappointment, the Island Sky’s operators ended its Indian Ocean routes.
Mr. Southey continues to lecture during his teaching breaks, but now he does it aboard a Rovos Rail luxury train traveling from Cape Town, South Africa, to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He receives a small honorarium for his trouble, just as he did on the cruise ship, but the work is much harder because he’s the sole lecturer.
“Sometimes I lecture four times a day,” says Mr. Southey, who nevertheless finds the experience worthwhile.
He may be getting a change of scenery soon. Noble Caledonia, the Island Sky’s operator, recently invited him to lecture in February on a one-time cruise around Madagascar and Mauritius.
Crossing the Pond
Neither pirates nor small-group dynamics have been concerns for Simon P. Newman or Susan Humphris, both of whom lecture aboard the superliners of the Cunard Cruise Line on its trans-Atlantic crossings.
Ms. Humphris, a senior scientist in geology and geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, estimates that she has lectured on a dozen sailings of the Queen Mary 2 since 2004. Illustrating her talks with videos and animations, she lectures on undersea earthquakes and volcanoes, midocean ridges, sea-floor hot springs, and how the oceans affect climate.
“You reach a broad audience because they’re essentially trapped on the ship for six days,” says Ms. Humphris. “And you can engage people in very thoughtful conversations about the ocean and its future.”
Mr. Newman, a professor of American history at the University of Glasgow, has managed to combine his three voyages with research trips and academic conferences in the United States. He has addressed 200 to 500 people at a time.
“The passengers tend to be older, with the time and the money that allows them to take over a week to cross the Atlantic,” Mr. Newman writes via e-mail.
In some cases, the passengers are themselves artifacts of history.
This past January aboard the Queen Elizabeth, an elderly American man approached Mr. Newman after his lecture on Winston Churchill’s relationship with the United States. Crying quietly, the man described how he had landed with U.S. forces at Normandy in 1944, fought alongside British soldiers all the way to Berlin, and then been chosen 20 years later to march behind the coffin at Churchill’s funeral, an event with which Mr. Newman had coincidentally concluded his talk.
Such conversations can be delicate, and the incident reinforces a point that both Ms. Hoffman and Ms. Dudek make about cruise-ship lecturers: Well-honed social skills are a must. Ms. Hoffman adds that an “entrepreneurial spirit” also helps.
But Mr. Southey, the South African historian, suggests that a shipboard lecturer’s biggest asset may be simple humility. One day as he was earnestly giving a talk to a roomful of passengers, an announcement from the captain crackled over the ship’s intercom: A pod of whales had been sighted starboard. “It was four or five whales doing their thing right beside the ship,” he recalls.
Within 30 seconds, every one of the passengers had bolted from the room and bounded onto the deck, save for Mr. Southey. And he wasn’t far behind them.
