Dr. Vincenzo Berlingeri
Italian Immigrant and Europa Crew
April 1951
According to an old Italian proverb a degree in law can open any door, towards getting a career. That is probably why, in April 1951, with WWII just behind me and with a few years of apprenticeship at the local ships’ chandlers’ firm in Genoa, I left Italy to join the S/S Europa in Le Havre as a junior purser. The S/S
Europa was an old P&O vessel, built for their trade from London to the Orient, and was originally named Mongolia. Later under a different company she became S/S
Rimutaka, plying the same waters.
The new owner, Incres Steamship Company of Panama, named her Europa and with a capacity of about 650 passengers on a one class only basis, with an all Italian crew, she was employed under the auspices of an international agency to carry stateless individuals, created by the war, as immigrants to Halifax and New York. Our other port of call was Plymouth, where we were anchoring for just a few hours to embark Britons who were immigrating to Canada and the United States.
By the time I joined the
Europa, she was already a sort of a veteran in this type of service, having started the previous year transporting the same stateless immigrants to Canada and the United States from Antwerp in Belgium. The switch from the aforementioned city to Le Havre was solely due to logistical reasons.
The round trip voyage practically took a month and the
Europa remained in that operation until the end of September 1951, when she went to a shipyard in Genoa to undergo radical renovation works.
At the end of the conversion she was renamed the cruise ship
Nassau, starting in late December of the same year in a weekly service from New York to Nassau, the first ship ever scheduled to sail year-round on a full cruising schedule. Years later, in 1960, she was sold to Natumex, a Mexican government agency created to pioneer cruising from Los Angeles, California to Acapulco, Mexico, and aptly renamed S/S
Acapulco. She retired in the spring of 1963.
But let us return to the faraway April of 1951.
Of course, I was very excited about my new job. I remember, just a few hours out of Le Havre the first view of the white cliffs of the English