KEY POINTS:
A hard-bitten colleague, hearing I had accepted an all-expenses-paid trip on the Queen Mary 2, referred me to a recently published book called Overboard, The Stories Cruise Lines Don't Want Told.
I didn't buy the book until I got back. My attitude to journalistic junkets is fairly straightforward. If the provider's purpose interests me and I think it can interest readers, I'll take it.
No benefactor in my experience has ever said I have to like what I'm shown and no amount of hospitality will stop me reporting for good or ill what a paying customer might experience.
But I will not go digging in the provider's trash. There are probably interesting stories in there and if any of them become apparent I'll say so, but if you set out with the purpose of discovering the underside of an industry you should, I think, do it on your own dime.
The cruise industry does itself no favours - or maybe it does - by keeping even its normal social precautions a fierce secret. Put 4000 people on the high seas for a week and certain problems can be expected.
Some won't get along, some will get dirty drunk, any sample of that size will produce its ratio of accidents, arguments, theft, sexual indiscretions, dire emergencies and, going by the wrinkles of many cruise devotees, more than its share of dementia and death.
Not that I saw any of these, but ask how a ship copes with them and conversation becomes awkward.
It's a myth, apparently, that death at sea means burial at sea. There was a medical centre (and not much else) on the bottom deck. We were told it had a "rather large sick bay".
As for troublemakers, the Captain was anxious to dispel my suggestion that the ocean was a legal vacuum. It most certainly was not, he said, counting on his fingers the different jurisdictions to which he was answerable for the safety of passengers.
He was less forthcoming about how he enforced law and order. There were security staff, Gurkhas we were given to believe, among the crew. There was no brig, but we could be confined to our cabin and sedated if necessary.
I encountered passengers who had heard tales of two assaults - or maybe two versions of the same assault - on the first leg of the voyage.
They had heard an appeal for a blood donor and calculated that three passengers had been removed from the ship at the next port of call. But they hadn't actually witnessed anything and the officers were saying nothing.
I can't blame them. If cruise companies had a policy of candour on the ordinary facts of life, would it comfort potential passengers or cloud people's visions of paradise at sea? They are selling a dream and, on my single experience, they deliver it.
Even the author of Overboard, Gwyn Topham, travel editor of Guardian Unlimited, acknowledges that, "millions of passengers do and will enjoy trouble-free cruises each year". Unfortunately that concession comes at the end of a severe catalogue of all that can go wrong.
He trawls through cases of food poisoning, disease outbreaks, ocean pollution, Third World crew conditions, sexual assaults, date rape, drug smuggling, piracy, terrorism (Achille Lauro), shipwreck (the Mikhail Lermontov), and notes the disinclination of cruise companies to investigate these things.
But the most interesting mishap is that of people simply disappearing, presumably overboard.
Topham says 24 passengers and four crew have disappeared from cruise ships in just two years to 2005, which is surprisingly few when you think of the partying, the unguarded rails and the thousands that must have travelled on the world's 300 or so cruise ships in that time.
And there is something else, something for which I wish I knew the word.
Outside your cabin you may have a private place to enjoy the breeze in your hair and the spray of the waves. If nobody else is there the vast churning ocean can have a creepy hypnotic effect that is quite inviting.
It is a little like looking down from a high building and imagining yourself falling. The spooky thing - the thought that makes you turn away - is not the risk of falling but the fact that the act of contemplating it makes it almost compelling.
There is an extra dimension to the vertiginous call of an ocean. The ship is probably doing 25-30 knots. The water below is flowing past quite fast. You know with near certainly that if you fell you would never be found. The ship could travel several hundred kilometres before you were missed and the ocean is too big.
Topham seems appalled that cruise ships are reluctant to turn back and search for anyone reported missing. I'm not even surprised.
The woman who sold me the book said she had read it and it had put her off the idea of a cruise. She will miss a treat but that is what trash trawling can do.
