Cunards First

In the early 1970's Cunard Line was rethinking its future. They just introduced Queen Elizabeth 2 as a successor to Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary and cruising was the direction to go because of the declining passengernumbers for linevoyages. Shown here is Rhapsody, originally Cunard Conquest but put into service as Cunard Princess.

To show they had entered another time, the names of their new cruiseships would be different too. Their traditional naming after Roman provinces was sent to the past and they started naming their ships with the company name as prefix. Two rather small ships were added to the fleet in the early years of the 1970's under the names of Cunard Adventurer and Cunard Ambassador. They just sailed for a few years, because they proved to be too small. Cunard Adventurer was sold to Norwegian Caribbean Lines as Sunward II and Cunard Ambassador burned out and was resold and rebuild as a lifestock carrier under the name of Linda Claussen. Cunard replaced them by two larger ships, named Cunard Conquest and Cunard Countess. Originally, these ships were ordered for the MGM studios, a Hollywood film company that produced movies. This company wanted to try something different by entering the cruise business and they planned a series of eight cruiseships. Just before the building of these ships started, they lost interest and only two of them were build and entered service for Cunard Line.

Triton was built as the first ship that was build for the 'new' Cunard Cruise Line. Her name for Cunard was Cunard Adventurer but the ship was resold quickly after just two years of service for Cunard after she proved to be too small for her role. She became Sunward II of Norwegian Caribbean Lines.

These new ships were a little more succesful for Cunard, as they stayed in the fleet untill the middle of the 1990's. They were chartered out to different companies when Cunard Line introduced new and more luxurious cruiseships at the end of this decade.