My favorite story about a cruise ship is The Lady Eve, a 1941 Preston Sturges comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck as a glamorous card shark crossing the Atlantic. It’s a movie to permanently fuse ships, games and savoir-faire in the consciousness, and I’m reminded of it when the ship’s consummately urbane hotel director invites me to play backgammon on the deck after dinner one night. Jean-Gabriel Hamdad is an Algerian who grew up in France and now lives in Australia; he’s witty and charming, and if this were a movie, I think he’d be played by Omar Sharif. We drink cognac, smoke Benson & Hedges, laugh a lot and play into the wee hours. The first night, I’m rusty and he’s kind, reminding me of strategies I’d long forgotten; I win a few games and he wins a few. And then, from the next night on, something strange happens. I can’t lose. I win game after game after game, and when I come back from sure defeat three times in a row, all three times winning by only one roll, I realize that the universe is taking this opportunity to remind me that life is guided by something far more profound than luck or chance. I never do lose another game on the ship.

Which brings me back to my earlier musings on islands. Sitting on the motu, looking out at the Ti‘a Moana, I realize my time on it has left me feeling reborn, reawakened, like I’ve just lived through some sort of fantastic magic trick. That that has happened on a swanky cruise ship in French Polynesia amazes me, but then I think, why not? In truth, this ship is itself yet another island—yet another that has brought with it adventure, abandon, unpredictability, bliss.    HH