What's New?

NEW PAGE Costa Atlantica gets her own page, disconnected from the main Costa page from now on. She is accompanied by two 2004-pictures (addition on october 26th, 2011).

NEW PAGE Pullmantur Cruises' Empress is feautured, including two pictures. The page is located under the Royal Caribbean banned due to the ships history (addition on october 26th, 2011).

Welcome to Castles of the Seas

Castles Of The Seas is the result of around fifteen years of cruiseliner and ferry photography. My name is Robert Klein and I became interested in oceanliners and modern cruiseships around 1994. In december 1996 I took my first photographs of the P&O ferry Pride Of Bilbao and since then, I tried to take pictures of as many passengerships as possible. In may 2005 I started up castlesoftheseas.nl and since then the website has been growing rapidly. First, I concentrated on the modern ships only, but later I also started to add older ships as well to create a good overview of passengerships sailing in our time. After I added older ships, I introduced ferries to the site because they are an important part of passenger travels by sea. This new version of the website is online since 2009.

The goal of castlesoftheseas is to inform about modern day cruising in the new millennium. I like to do this by collecting information, history, funny facts and stories about the cruiseliners of our age. Besides that, I look back to the early days of cruising from the end of the 1960's onwards to give a complete overview of the history of cruising and cruiseships. Because it is an ever changing industry and this is purely a site created by a shipping enthousiast, not every information is updated by day although I always try to be as accurate as possible. This site is not related to any company and because of that this site is no portal to a travelagency, some of them can be found on the linkspage. Feel free to contact me when you have questions, tips or information that I can use to make this site more complete for everyone who loves cruiseships and the history of this fascinating industry. Also, you can leave your comments here at the passengerlist.

I do never use programs like photoshop to create better pictures, all pictures shown on this website are original and not modified. I do not use it, because I think pictures always should be original, and they have to show the situation and the ship as it was at that exact moment. Next to that, I firmly believe that altering photographs by making them better or adding better weathercircumstanses, is historicly seen incorrect. When we look at old pictures of ocean liners we see how they were at that time. When next generations look at a lot of todays shipping pictures, they have to hope these pictures are acurate and there will no certainty of historic fact. I also believe pictures can be beautiful without modification so the need to adjust things simply is not there. On the pictures, I try to avoid to have obstructing items in front of the main focus, although sometimes it can add something to the picture like depth or vibe. Also the background I think is very important, and I always try to look for the best shot. Within all pictures, I try to show a little of the vibe of the day. In that sense, rainy day pictures and dark clouds can be as fascinating as nice-weather shots. The newest photographs are shot with a simple camera, the 7.1 megapixel Olympus SP-510UZ with 63-63 mm lens. Older pictures, before 2006, are taken with even simpeler cameras.

Because I took most of my pictures in northern Europe, some well known ships and classes of ships are not included simply because they never sailed here. But in my opinion, northen Europe is a great place to be, because of the wide variety of ships sailing this northern waters. Here you will find the new megaliners as well as the old classics of the seas and this combination gives a good indication of what cruiseships sail around the world today. On the Shipping List you can find A-Z which ships are included on this website.

From this year onwards, I also added another part of shipping to this website, called the Heritage Of Steam. On these pages, steamships and steamtugs are shown, some of them dating back to the 1870's. Although not all of these ships do have direct links to passengershipping, I do know that most cruiseship fanatics also like the history of steam so I think this is a nice extra touch to this website. Holland still has one of the largest historic fleets of steamships in the world. These ships are still sailing, thanks to the dedicated work, love and energy from the people who own them.

The information I use on this site comes from several books and websites, as well as newspapers and magazines and of course my own research. But I want to name www.maritimematters.com, www.cruisepage.com,  www.faktaomfartyg.se, wikipedia and the 'Great Passenger Ships Of The World'-books by Arnold Kludas, Frank Heine and Frank Lose as my main sources of information and data.