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Humble beginnings: many of today's top cruise lines grew from hardscrabble roots.

Article Excerpt
Ever wonder, when you are booking a cabin on a Carnival ship, why there is an "Empress" deck? Or why for years staunchly British Princess Cruises featured an Italian dining room? Or where "Costa" got its name? Although these three huge firms are now among the proud members of the "World's Leading Cruise Lines" group, they, and others, still have their little quirks that give silent testimony to the humble beginnings of modern cruising.

Today the major cruise lines boast of the unique and revolutionary features they offer passengers, but it was not always that way. Once pleasure cruising was a place where old ocean liners went to die. The great trans-Atlantic lines like Cunard and Holland America employed their grandest ships with the most revolutionary features on the liner routes crossing the oceans. While these firms are players in today's cruise industry, they were relative latecomers to the broader segments of cruising.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the first modern cruise lines began to appear, including Carnival, Norwegian Caribbean, Princess, and Royal Caribbean. Of these four firms that would come to dominate the industry, only Royal Caribbean began with purpose-built cruise ships. The other lines were not so lucky, as they pressed smaller, older, and sometimes ill-suited ships into cruising

When the modern cruise industry began, it was still common to find family-owned-and-run shipping companies. Costa, which is the name of the family in Italy that owned the firm until 1997, was one of the pioneers in modern cruising. The line traces its roots to 1924 when brothers Federico, Eugenio, and Enrico Costa bought their first ship--a modest freighter for shipping olive oil, not passengers. After World War II, Costa entered the passenger trade, focusing on the emigration from Italy to South America.

Costa's first real passenger ship, the Anna C., was nothing like the luxurious 112,000-gross-register-ton/3,780-passenger Costa Concordia that is being...

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