(Virgin Voyages didn’t respond to requests for comment. Four days later, another worker from the Philippines died in an apparent suicide on Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady.
Next was a Filipino cook, Kennex Bundaon, who was found dead in his cabin on Carnival’s AIDAblu. A crew member aboard the ship says many believed it was another suicide, though the company said he’d died of natural causes. Around this time a Chinese contractor was found dead on Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas. Two weeks later, on May 10, Evgenia Pankrushyna, a waitress from Ukraine, died after jumping overboard from Carnival’s Regal Princess near Rotterdam. Ship security cameras captured him leaping into the water that morning, according to Greek authorities. On April 29, an electrical engineer from Poland on Royal Caribbean’s Jewel of the Seas disappeared while the ship was anchored in the Saronic Gulf, south of Athens. The pay per hour is low by American standards, but workers say that it’s more than they could earn at home and that they appreciate the opportunity to travel the world. Their salaries can range from about $650 to $2,000 a month, depending on seniority.
Lower-level crew-such as junior housekeepers and galley staffers-often come from poorer countries and commit to half-year stints or longer at sea, working 8 to 10 hours, seven days a week. High levels of depression stem from the jobs’ long contract lengths and stressful demands. An October 2019 study on the mental well-being of crew, commissioned by a group affiliated with the International Transport Workers’ Federation, the big maritime trade union, found that even before the pandemic about a fifth of mariners surveyed said they had suicidal thoughts. Interviews with affected crew members and their families suggest that despite assurances from cruise operators that crew were well cared for, their mental health was at times an afterthought.
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