BORDEAUX: French authorities on Wednesday confined more than 1,700 passengers and crew on a British cruise ship after an elderly passenger died and dozens suffered upset stomachs, health officials said.

They insisted there was no connection with the hantavirus outbreak, suspected of killing three passengers on the Dutch MV Hondius cruise ship that set sail from Argentina, which has sparked international alarm.

Dozens suffered from upset stomachs aboard the Ambition — most of whose 1,233 passengers are from Brit­ain or Ireland — which arrived in the western port of Bordeaux on Tuesday, with 514 crew members also on board.

One 92-year-old British passenger on the Ambition, run by the UK-based Ambassador Cruise Line company, had died of a heart attack, health authorities said.

From Black Death to Covid, ships have long hosted outbreaks

“At this stage, no link has been established with the gastroenteritis episode,” they added on Wednesday afternoon. Initial tests ruled out an outbreak of norovirus, a highly contagious form of gastroenteritis which causes vomiting and diarrhoea, but secondary tests were still underway, they added. Food poisoning had not been excluded.

Seos Guilidhe, a 52-year-old from the Northern Irish capital Belfast, sent a message via Facebook as he was “playing bingo”. “We are onboard with extra sanitation guidelines in place. It is not as bad as it was during Covid. People just going about as normal,” he wrote in the message, referring to lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic. “We are just waiting on test results coming back from the French government to see what the elder gentleman died from,” he added.

Waiting for ‘clearance’

Passengers on board the Ambition showed peak symptoms on Monday when the ship was docked in Brest, the officials said. The man in his nineties died before they arrived at the port in France’s northwestern Brittany region.

The ship, which left the Shetland Islands north of Scotland on May 6, stopped in Belfast and Liverpool in England before reaching Bordeaux, from where it was scheduled to depart for Spain. It was initially supposed to dock back in Liverpool on May 22.

The cruise line company on its Facebook page said its figures showed an increase in cases after embarking guests in Liverpool.

No security measures were in place around the ship as it was docked in Bordeaux on Wednesday, a reporter said. Passengers were taking pictures of the French city from the deck.

Those on board would be allowed to disembark “once clearance is granted”, the cruise line said.

Ships hosted outbreaks

A deadly outbreak on a cruise liner is just the latest in a long history of infectious diseases spreading rapidly in the cramped confines of ships, from the Black Death to Covid.

People around the world remain in quarantine or self-isolation after a rare outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship left three dead and infected at least seven more.

Another scare came on Wednesday, when more than 1,700 passengers were confined to a cruise ship docked in the French city of Bordeaux after an elderly passenger died of a heart attack. The latest incidents shone a light on how ships — whether they are cruise liners, aircraft carriers or old wooden boats — can be the ideal environment for viruses to spread.

“The worst place to have an epidemic, like a fire, is in close quarters far from help, such as a ship on the high seas,” US historian Alfred Crosby once wrote about the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. Jean-Pierre Auffray, the honorary president of the French Society of Maritime Medicine, said that “the risk is twofold”.

While diseases can now hop continents on airplanes, for most of human history they crossed seas on boats. This was how the Black Death — the most devastating pandemic in human history — arrived on Europe’s shores back in the 1340s.

Published in Dawn, May 14th, 2026