For centuries, cargo ships allowed regular travelers to join their voyages. What happened?

As the MV Alejandrina docked along the waterfront of Quellón in southern Chile, a few dozen passengers rushed to reserve their sleeping places in the cafeteria and on the open-air stern deck. Having already forked over a few extra pesos for an airplane-style butaca (armchair) seat, I headed upstairs to a small lounge near the bridge.

The little cargo ferry — a bright orange, oversized version of a World War II landing craft — finally pulled out around midnight as part of the first leg of a three-day voyage through the Chonos Archipelago.

Dubbed the “outer limit of Christianity” by 16th-century Spanish Jesuit missionaries, the islands remain super-remote, even five centuries after the conquistadores first arrived. There are no roads or airports. And while some cruise ships sail through the region, renowned for snowcapped volcanoes and blue-hued glaciers, they don’t call on any of the tiny island ports.

That’s how I found myself on a cargo ship that provided the only connection to the outside world for half a dozen secluded landfalls, places so off the grid that most Chileans have never heard of them.

But though cargo ships continue to provide that function in various parts of the world, fewer carry paying passengers (a.k.a. tourists) to these distant, exotic ports of call.

“Almost nothing is available anymore since Covid,” says Arne Gudde, owner of Langsamreisen, a German company that books freighter travel in the Baltic Sea, the Atlantic and South Pacific.

Langsamreisen is one of the few survivors in a niche travel industry that had around half a dozen major players before the pandemic. Most of them are no longer in business, victims of Covid-era health and safety issues, combined with enhanced onboard security during an era when the high seas are increasingly dangerous because of warfare and piracy, and the added hassle of catering to civilians on top of their primary function.

Boasting one of the world’s largest container ship fleets, Denmark’s famed Maersk Line, with its giant Triple E Class vessels, is among the cargo companies that have stopped taking passengers since the pandemic.

“Carrying non-crew personnel onboard requires additional safety procedures and operational support, including onboarding and accompaniment while on the vessel,” says Maersk spokesperson Chelsea Pavona Gardner.

“As our ships are dedicated to cargo operations, passenger travel is not a service we provide.”

The Golden Age

Cargo ships have carried passengers for centuries, but the golden age of freighter travel was the first half of the 20th century, before long-distance air services became commonplace.

The romance and adventure of traveling by tramp steamers and banana boats was popularized by movies like “The Long Voyage Home” (1940) with John Wayne and “China Seas” (1935) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow.

For others, cargo ships were simply the most convenient (and often cheapest) way of getting from Point A to Point B. And it wasn’t always glamorous.

Growing up in the Caribbean, Julia Clerk and her parents crossed the Atlantic on a 12-passenger banana boat to visit relatives in England.

“We played shuffleboard, read books, lay in the sun, visited the captain on the bridge, and talked a lot to the other passengers,” she recalls.

“And we dressed up at night for quite an elaborate white-glove dinner with the officers and the captain.”

The voyage back to the Caribbean was especially memorable.

“Because the ship had already delivered its bananas to England, it wasn’t very stable on the way home. The hold was filled with water. We had to skirt a hurricane and the seas were exceedingly rough. I felt so seasick that I literally couldn’t get out of bed and remember lying there for hours watching my suitcase slide back and forth across the cabin floor, in and out of a small closet, as the ship pitched.”

But the high seas didn’t daunt her mother.

“She was determined to make it to every single meal and at one point, she and the captain were the only people still eating and not holed up in their cabins.”

Just before Covid, New Zealander Ben Mack boarded the container ship Amerigo Vespucci for an eight-day journey between Port Klang, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

“I actually found it very relaxing, and inspirational,” says Mack.

“It was fascinating watching the crew go about their duties on the bridge. There was also quite a bit to see at sea, as we were in a busy shipping lane, and so occasionally would see other vessels, from small fishing boats to hulking cargo ships even larger than the 365-meter Amerigo Vespucci.

“It was well under US$2,000 for the whole voyage — basically an all-inclusive, mobile holiday! It remains one of my favorite adventures, one I’d do again in a heartbeat.”

If it were only possible.

Modern cargo ship travel

So what’s left post-Covid?

A few short-haul cargo ferries continue to take passengers, such as the vessel that carried me through southern Chile, and the MV Bella Desgagnés, which calls on small communities along Quebec’s Côte-Nord.

There’s also a once-a-month cargo ship from Cape Town that services two ports along the Namibian coast before sailing to St. Helena and Ascension, two super-remote British islands in the South Atlantic.

Meanwhile, Langsamreisen is currently offering passage on freighters between Antwerp and Finland, and Rotterdam and Iceland.

For cargo ship journeys in French Polynesia, there’s the Aranui V. The company was founded in 1954 by the Wong family to transport vital supplies like food and fuel from territorial capital Papeete to outlying island groups like the Tuamotus and Marquesas.

By the 1980s, “the company wasn’t doing so well with just freight,” says Aranui executive vice president Eric Wong. “My father and uncle were running the company and so they decided to take passengers along with the freight, and they modified the existing vessel to more comfortably take passengers.”

They also discovered there was a niche market for cargo ship travel as well as a growing group of travelers with a goal of visiting places that were “very beautiful, untouched and still had a deep cultural identity.”

There weren’t a lot of amenities in those days, he adds. While freight was being offloaded at each port, passengers had to figure out how to explore the island by seeking out locals who could act as their guides. Nowadays, passengers can pre-book shore excursions just like on a regular cruise ship.

Wong admits the Aranui earns more revenue from passengers than cargo these days. But he says the freight business retains its importance as “a lifeline to these islands.”

“It’s kind of unique because the people have taken the vessel as their own. We bring tourists to them, we bring economic activity, we bring the goods for them, we import cars — almost everything they need.”

In recent years, Aranui has expanded beyond its original service and now offers cargo-passenger cruises to other South Pacific landfalls like Bora Bora, the Cook Islands and even far-off Pitcairn. Wong says growing demand encouraged the company to commission a second cargo-passenger hybrid called the Aranoa that will start service between Papeete and the Austral islands next year.

Australian Craig Tansley has traveled with Aranui several times, but his most recent voyage remains the most memorable because it was during a port call that he asked his girlfriend Jen to marry him, with musical help from the ship’s crew.

“I asked a couple of guys from the crew where I could surprise her and take her out and pop the question, and they helped me organize it on an island called Fakarava in the Tuamotus,” Tansley explains. “I got down on one knee and guys were playing ukuleles behind the coconut trees, then someone came out with a bottle of champagne. It sounds really cheesy, but it was actually pretty cool.”

Years before that, Tansley was a passenger on the MV Silver Supporter cargo ship from Mangareva island in French Polynesia to Pitcairn, a British possession that’s one of the world’s most isolated inhabited places.

“It was a genuine supply ship,” he recalls. “Very basic. And it was really rough. We had 20-foot seas on the bow the whole way there. We spent most of our time on the bridge, just hanging out with the crew and talking about their experiences and checking out the views.”

Among the other passengers were two American seismologists undertaking research in Pitcairn, a New Zealand ophthalmologist on his way to examine the eyes of the four dozen or so residents, and the British High Commissioner for the island.

The future of freighter travel

While large cargo ship fleets continue to shy away from transporting civilians, one new shipping company has decided that passengers are an integral part of their service.

Based at Saint-Nazaire in western France, the Neoliner Origin made its first trans-Atlantic passage in October of 2025 on a route that includes Baltimore, Halifax and the French overseas territory of St. Pierre & Miquelon, off Canada’s east coast.

What makes the roll-on, roll-off vessel unique is that it’s powered by solar sails with a diesel-electric system as a backup when the wind dies. The company estimates the innovative propulsion system reduces fuel consumption by 80% compared to traditional cargo ships.

Neoline spokesperson Gabriella Paulet says the nine co-founders, all of them veterans of the merchant navy, decided on solar sail power as part of a broader goal to make shipping more sustainable and environmentally friendly as a response to climate change.

“The idea of adding passengers on board was immediately part of the project,” says Paulet, adding that the response to their passenger service has been overwhelming.

“We’ve been full on every crossing. And actually, we have a lot of emails and questions from passengers who want to cross the Atlantic with their car.”

Neoliner Origin offers six passenger cabins, a library with books and a piano, and a mess where they can dine on their own or mix with crew members.

The company has already added Zeebrugge, Belgium as a fifth port of call, and may add more solar sail powered ships to the fleet.

“We are waiting like a bit more to be sure that commercially it’s working, that the route is well designed, etc.,” says Paulet. “But we are thinking of another one for sure.”

Looking back, I consider my voyage on the MV Alejandrina through southern Chile as one of my most memorable seagoing adventures. I didn’t get a lot of sleep and the shipboard cafeteria was nothing to write home about. But there were engaging encounters in every port of call.

Landing on the beach at Balmaceda, the vehicle deck suddenly transformed into an impromptu outdoor market as locals rushed onto the ferry to purchase goods from the truck drivers and peddle meat pies, maté tea and other snacks to the crew and passengers.

One of them was fisherman Ardi Carcano, who after moving his catch onto the ship started selling fresh-from-the-sea clams out of a bucket. Complemented by a slice of lemon I’d purloined from the galley, I ate them on the bow in a sudden burst of sunshine as we pulled away.

Our next-to-last landfall was Puerto Gaviota on Isla Magdalena, a tiny village with pastel-colored houses arrayed along an elevated boardwalk above the harbor. The one thing that struck me right away was the fact that none of the buildings looked nearly as old as the other places we had anchored during the voyage.

Taking a break from constructing a gymnasium beside the village’s only church, Robert Vadim explained that the island was settled in the 1980s by political dissidents trying to get away from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. “Or people running from something else,” he added. “Maybe not criminals, but people doing something the government or regular society didn’t approve of.”

Whenever the secret police arrived, they would disappear into the island’s thick forest until it was safe to return. Even after the Pinochet regime fell in 1990, many of the exiles chose to remain at Puerto Gaviota and the village eventually secured legal status as the only settlement inside what is now Isla Magdalena National Park.

I would never have had those adventures and encounters on a regular cruise ship voyage. And while it may not be as romantic as those 1930s movies portrayed, and options have dwindled, cargo ship travel remains an alluring way to explore the far corners of the planet, one that will hopefully last far into the future.

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