The gangway was long gone, by then. There was just one way to enter the rust-etched, echoing hull that bobbed in the shallows off Alang, a small town on India’s Arabian Sea coast. It is the world’s largest shipbreaking yard, where cruise ships go to die, where in January of 2015, a slim figure with cornflower-blue eyes watched the frayed strands of a rope ladder flick and twitch with the swell. It didn’t look too bad, he thought. He’d seen worse.
It took nerve for cruise ship historian Peter Knego to get even that far. Only after dodging government regulations and watchful guards did he reach the 553-foot ship that had once been Island Princess, star of The Love Boat, a 1970s television series widely credited with making cruising popular for a generation of Americans. By early 2015, the vessel, newly rechristened Amen, was floating on borrowed time.
A pilot would soon ram the ship straight onto the beach, keel furrowing deep into oily silt. Workers would crack open her hull, spilling strong sunlight into cabins and suites, dining rooms and polished dance floors. Hoping to preserve any treasures still inside before that happened, Knego had rushed to India from his home in California. It was his ninth trip to the Indian shipbreaking yard, which dismantles about half the maritime vessels recycled each year. A meticulous man who dislikes heights, heat, and bugs, Knego knew he’d have to face all three to find anything worth saving.
When it comes to cruises, it’s easy to overlook history altogether, amid the brighter glare of the new and the now: bigger-than-ever ships, increasingly bonkers amenities, and sailings long enough to qualify as feats of endurance. Knego’s life and work are an invitation to look again—he’s spent nearly 45 years looping the globe, on more than 300 sailings, with a mission to document the last days of ocean liners and vintage vessels with nearly forgotten style. Along the way he’s snapped tens of thousands of photos, captured footage for his YouTube channel, and made his home a live-in museum of salvaged maritime treasures.
Now 64, he’s looking toward the future, wondering how the world will remember our own sea voyages, at a time when more people are cruising than ever before. But all those years ago he gathered his nerve, stared upwards, and grabbed the first rung.
His adventures began, as adventures so often do, in a library. Knego spent his childhood dreaming of the sea—though not the sun-bleached, beach-cool version that captivated his Los Angeles classmates. Instead, he thrilled to the golden age of elegant liners and grand ocean crossings, a passion sparked by a grade-school assignment about the British passenger liner Lusitania that broke transatlantic speed records before her 1915 sinking by a German U-boat. One book led to another: At the mural-filled Los Angeles Central Library that went up in flames in 1986, he pored over volumes detailing the engineering and artistry of ocean liners.
Known for streamlined profiles designed to travel quickly across oceans, the liners—forerunners of modern cruise ships—were the preferred mode of overseas travel for more than 100 years, and they had a golden age that stretched from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century. For transatlantic journeys, they weren’t eclipsed by “airliners” until the 1950s. Many were still in service during Knego’s childhood.
“I got more and more fascinated by it,” he said. “I just took it to the extreme.” In junior high, he saved lunch money for an overnight trip from Long Beach to San Francisco aboard a cargo passenger ship. In 1980, he took his first real cruise, on the Oceanic Independence, which had launched in 1951. As it wound for a week between the Hawaiian islands, everyone else sunbathed and sipped umbrella-topped drinks; the 19-year-old Knego stalked the ship’s disused second- and third-class lounges, still with original fittings from the vessel’s time as an ocean liner shuttling passengers between the United States and the Mediterranean. Dusty cupboards held intimate ephemera—vintage menus, programs—like messages from a lost world.
I got more and more fascinated by it. I just took it to the extreme.
Knego had found his calling: cruising aboard ships that were on the cusp of retirement, setting sail as often as he could to capture their twilight voyages. As a documentarian, he’d lucked into near-perfect timing. Since most ships have a lifespan of around 30 years, the last generation of ocean liners was still afloat when Knego took his first real cruise.
“They were starting to build a whole new generation of cruise ships around that time, and they were cool ships, but they weren’t as classy and as unique and original as these old ocean liners were that weren’t going to last,” Knego said. Still, there were some high points, like how lava hissed into the Hawaiian waves while he sat aboard the SS Constitution, which launched in 1950 and was the ship that whisked Grace Kelly from New York to Monaco for her royal wedding in 1956. Knego took six voyages aboard the 1,456-passenger SS Rotterdam, which was christened at her 1958 launch by a Dutch queen gripping a sterling silver ax.
But what Knego loves the most, in the older boats, was how they once conveyed a sense of place, from interior decor to design and culture: American ships had American designers, the same with Italian. The British 1934 liner Queen Mary was adorned with landscapes and seascapes by British painters Bertram Nicholls, Algernon Cecil Newton, and Edward Wadsworth; more than 50 wood varieties from across the British empire gleamed in marquetry and murals. Maritime design sometimes came ashore, as when the aerodynamic lines of the streamline moderne style aboard the 1932 SS Normandie influenced buildings from Los Angeles to London. In French, streamline moderne is known as style paquebot: ocean-liner style. It was a time when cities, too, dreamed of the sea, and passenger ships conjured travel, momentum, optimistic modernity.
The cruises, the photos; it was enough for a while. Knego had a job in the music industry. To span the gaps between sailings, he pored over history books. But then, in 2004, he learned that 10 ships were headed to Alang, to be dismantled and sold for scrap, including the snub-sterned Apollo, first built as the liner Empress of Canada for the Canadian-Pacific line.
“I wanted to document the beautiful ships in their demise, because that’s part of their history as well,” Knego said. What he saw in India seemed nearly apocalyptic; he thought of the haunting scene, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, of a steamship abandoned in Gobi Desert sands. “Imagine 100 ships on a 10-mile stretch of beach, lined up and being cut. It’s distressing, yet it’s fascinating at the same time.”
He was determined to save what he could, and in the years that followed, Knego scoured and haggled and rescued, filling some 15 shipping containers with artifacts he found: 1950s Italian chairs, wood paneling, etched glass panels from British ships. Every door in his Oceanside, California, home is pulled from a ship. His closets are overflowing, as are each of four storage units. He’s sold chairs to Chateau Marmont, artwork to Hollywood stars. Last year, he loaned some of his favorite artifacts to a San Diego Maritime Museum exhibit on ocean liner and cruise ship ephemera, and in his online shop, you can browse listings for hand-painted Italian panels or crockery stamped with the orange-and-blue logo of the Hellenic Mediterranean Line.
The interior of Peter Knego’s home in Oceanside, California, is filled with artifacts from historic ocean liners, including the Island Princess, star of The Love Boat. Every door in his home is from a ship.
Courtesy Peter Knego
Back in 2015, when he climbed that rope ladder into the Island Princess, what he saw in his flashlight beam astonished him. “Not only was she the ‘Love Boat’ and very important in historic terms, but she was a beautiful ship,” he said. Through a local contact, he negotiated with the shipbreakers to purchase teak decking, mauve loveseats with spindly midcentury legs, a bronze mermaid sculpture by Norwegian artist Per Ung, filling a shipping container to the brim. Colorful glass panels from the lobby adorn Knego’s kitchen.
Even this enthusiastic salvage, though, doesn’t put a dent in the real work of dismantling big ships. Shipbreakers at Alang cut apart 125 ships in the 2024 fiscal year, generating a pile of jagged scrap worth hundreds of millions of dollars and outweighing 2.5 Empire State Buildings. Many workers at Alang are subsistence farmers who travel from their villages during the lean months between harvests, according to the advocacy group NGO Shipbreakers Platform, and they often work without access to basic safety equipment.
Such labor partly explains Knego’s need to sneak into the yards. While buying from shipbreakers is perfectly legal, he suspects the Indian government slow-walks permits for the secured areas to avoid embarrassing footage of workers toiling in dire conditions. “The permits never come through,” he said. “It’s their way of making it impossible.” (It’s illegal to take photographs there.)
The shipbreaking yards also raise environmental concerns. Ships are driven right onto beaches for the work, so pollutants soak into the ground or wash to sea. The same is true at the two other big South Asian shipbreaking yards—at Chattogram, Bangladesh, and the Arabian Sea port of Gadani in Pakistan. (Things are slightly better at the other major global shipbreaking yard, in Aliaga, Türkiye, although NGO Shipbreakers Platform notes that pollution and worker welfare remain critical issues.)
Yet if pound for pound, artifact salvage scarcely tips the scales, aficionados say it’s still essential to pluck away historical artifacts before the remainder is melted down or sold in local markets. Cruise lines themselves tend to move on quickly, shunning the past for the next big, blockbuster boat, leaving history to the passionate amateurs. Brokers and collectors from around the world comb the yards in Aliaga, Türkiye, stepping over piled up anchor chains and gimballed compasses under salt-fogged glass. Many, like Knego, sell their finds online, from the Galveston, Texas–based Nautical Antiques & Tropical Decor (portholes, figureheads, ship wheels) to Ohio’s Big Ship Salvage (ship bells, binnacles, clinometers).
There are few liners left afloat today: British line Cunard still sails ocean liners, but the SS United States, the largest liner ever constructed in America, is currently docked on the Delaware River and will soon be sunk as an artificial reef. The interior is bare as whale bones picked clean by a hungry ocean. (In fact, it was picked clean by enthusiasts and antique dealers at a 1984 Guernsey’s auction in New York.) Two decades ago, Knego swore he’d be a lifelong traditionalist, that his interest in salvage, which began with ocean liners, would end with vintage 1970s cruise ships like the Island Princess.
But nostalgia is a moving target, and time has a deft way of burnishing the mundane. While he hasn’t returned to Alang since 2015, Knego hasn’t retired from salvage. Shopping from afar through contacts, he filled his most recent shipping container with finds from a trio of Carnival ships launched in the early 1980s—Tropicale, Holiday, Celebration—whose theatrical corniness once left him rolling his eyes. “As much as I didn’t appreciate them at the time, I get them for their uniqueness and originality,” he said. That same theatrical corniness, it turned out, would become a defining style of the era.
And Knego has cruised on plenty of new ships, too—they’re marvels, he’s quick to say. Where liners, like the 950-passenger Oceanic Independence, had forward-looking curves to cut through waves, new ships’ blocky silhouettes instead maximize interior space and seafront balconies. “They look like giant apartment buildings, and that’s fine,” he says. “Their purpose is to get you on board and take you into a new world—to distract you with all the bells and whistles, the specialty restaurants, the spas, the roller coasters. . . . They offer to entertain and distract and overwhelm.”
The 20-deck-high Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world, accommodates nearly 10,000 guests and crew. Ovens aboard, cranking around the clock, turn out some 40,000 baked goods daily. It has a waterfall and an ice arena. Who needs to disembark when you can access seven swimming pools with six Skittles-colored waterslides noodling overhead?
Actually going places—traveling, in other words—can almost seem beside the point, which could explain why the new models still leave Knego a little cold. For some aficionados of ocean liners, those new spacious lobbies and walls of soaring glass have the slick placelessness of chain hotels or airport lounges.
One day, though, Knego knows that a maritime historian, a like-minded soul, decades his junior, will probably scour archival images of those very cruise ships. He’s humble in the face of history. “I think you need to let some time pass before you know what’s classic and what’s forgettable,” he said. “I do hope someone in the future will want to carry this on.”
Perhaps they’ll climb frayed rope ladders into the Icon of the Seas, then dreamily trace her loop-the-looping waterslides in candy hues faded pastel by sunshine. Maybe they’ll walk the ship’s 20 cavernous decks, pulses pounding. Flashlights in hand, they’ll go in search of those swimming pools, the ice arena once filled with cheering crowds. When they leave, they’ll fill homes and closets and storage containers, cherishing the artifacts of our own fleeting days at sea.
