Festivale

The ship that would eventually sail for Carnival Cruise Line as the Festivale began her life as an ocean liner built for the mail and passenger service between Britain and South Africa. Constructed by the celebrated Clydebank shipyard of John Brown and Company in Scotland, she was launched on 17 January 1961 as the Transvaal Castle, a vessel commissioned by the Union-Castle Line. Delivered on 16 December 1961, she measured roughly 32,700 gross tons and stretched about 760 feet, or some 232 meters, in length with a beam of around 90 feet. She entered service on her maiden voyage from Southampton to Durban on 18 January 1962. Among her design distinctions were a bulbous bow, which made her one of the first British-built mail ships so equipped, and an innovative single-class layout that departed from the rigid class segregation typical of ocean liners of the period.

For roughly a decade and a half the ship carried passengers, mail, and cargo along the long ocean route linking the United Kingdom and southern Africa. In January 1966 her ownership was transferred to the South African Marine Corporation, better known as Safmarine, and she was renamed S.A. Vaal. Despite the change of flag and name, the vessel was chartered back to Union-Castle and continued to operate with much the same crew and on much the same service. She was re-registered in Cape Town in 1969 while still being managed from London. As long-distance sea travel gave way to air travel and the traditional mail-ship trade declined, her useful life on the South African run drew to a close, and she made her final arrival at Southampton in October 1977.

At that point the ship found a new owner in Carnival Cruise Line, a young and rapidly growing company that was reshaping the vacation cruise business in the United States. Carnival sent the former liner to Kobe, Japan, for an extensive reconstruction that reportedly cost in the region of thirty million dollars. The conversion, carried out across 1977 and 1978, adapted a purpose-built ocean liner into a modern warm-weather cruise ship. Former cargo spaces were stripped out and rebuilt to greatly expand passenger accommodation, and the interiors were reworked with lounges, a discotheque, casinos, and other public rooms. The colorful, theatrical decorative style that came to be associated with Carnival, with its bold reds, neon accents, and gleaming chrome, was applied to the ship, giving her a festive character quite different from the reserved elegance of her earlier career.

As rebuilt, the ship was renamed Festivale and reflagged, and she emerged as a substantial vessel of roughly 33,000 gross tons with capacity for well over a thousand passengers served by a large crew. She retained the steam turbine propulsion of her ocean-liner origins, driving twin screws, a machinery arrangement that gave her a service speed considerably higher than many later purpose-built cruise ships. When she debuted in 1978 she ranked among the largest ships in the Carnival fleet and was described as by far the largest passenger vessel then based in Florida, an emblem of Carnival's growing ambitions. Her ocean-liner heritage was visible in her sturdy hull and classic profile even after the modern superstructure changes.

Entering Carnival service in 1978, the Festivale settled into the role for which she had been rebuilt, offering week-long Caribbean cruises out of Miami. She sailed to popular tropical destinations and became a well-known member of the fleet during a formative era for the company, helping to establish the accessible, fun-focused style of cruising that Carnival marketed to a broad American public. Shortly after entering service she also gained a measure of fame beyond the cruise trade by serving as a floating filming location for a television production. For close to two decades she carried holidaymakers through the Caribbean, a workhorse of Carnival's expansion years.

By the mid-1990s Carnival was taking delivery of far larger and more modern purpose-built cruise ships, and the aging Festivale, with her thirsty steam turbines and older layout, no longer fit the fleet. In 1996 she left Carnival service and was chartered to Dolphin Cruise Line, which renamed her IslandBreeze. Under this name she continued to cruise and was at times chartered to the British tour operator Thomson Holidays for the European market, giving the veteran ship a second act with a new clientele. Ownership and operating arrangements shifted over the following years as the smaller cruise companies of the era merged, changed hands, and struggled financially.

The ship eventually passed to Premier Cruise Line, which operated a fleet of distinctively painted vessels, and around 2000 she was renamed The Big Red Boat III in keeping with that company's branding. Her time under Premier was brief, for the company collapsed into bankruptcy in the autumn of 2000, and the ship was laid up along with the rest of the fleet. She remained idle for a considerable period while creditors and prospective buyers weighed her fate, but no viable new career materialized for a vessel by then approaching forty years old and increasingly costly to operate.

With no further commercial future, the former liner was ultimately sold to shipbreakers. In 2003 she was delivered to the scrapping beaches of Alang, India, and there she was broken up over the following months. So ended a long and varied career that had begun as a proud Union-Castle mail ship on the South African run, passed through fame as one of Carnival's flagship cruise vessels, and continued under a succession of later owners before the ship was finally dismantled roughly four decades after her launch.