A cruise ship worker has opened up about a series of astonishing things found inside the cabin of a passenger.
Lucy Southerton, a cruise ship worker who runs the Cruising as Crew YouTube channel, made the revelations on a recent episode of the Sail Away: Uncensored Cruise Podcast.
When asked which types of crime occur at sea, Lucy revealed that theft was something that she’d witnessed personally, having spent time working in the cruise ship shops.
However, it would appear that some thieves are more daring than others on the open sea, as one particular person stole several surprising items and took them back to their room.
Lucy said: “One that I’ve been witness to more than a few times is theft, having worked in the shops. You see it all the time. I remember this one guy; he stole…I was working in the beauty shop on P&O and he stole some like face cream.”
She continued: “But I saw him do it but you’re not allowed to say anything until they’ve like left the shop because technically, until they’ve stepped out of the shop, they haven’t stolen anything.
“But I told my manager because that’s what you’re supposed to do, so (I) got security involved. Security went to the cabin and we just thought he had the face cream because that’s obviously all we saw.
“They got to his cabin; he’d taken like three chairs from like venues, different venues. He had a painting from the art gallery. He’d been stealing from all the shops.”
When asked how it would be possible to steal a painting, Lucy added that it was reported that the piece of art was missing but she didn’t know the “ins and outs”.
Crime on the high seas isn’t unheard of; in March, it was reported that a bar steward on a cruise liner had tried to smuggle more than £2m worth of cocaine into the UK.
The steward had stashed 28kg of cocaine in his cabin but was caught trying to hand it overboard to members of an organised crime group in a dinghy.
Criminal incidents on cruise ships aren’t limited to just drug smuggling, however, as they’ve also been the setting for murder. In 1947, deck steward James Camb threw the body of actress Gay Gibson through a porthole.
Camb, who initially denied seeing her, later claimed that Gibson had died due to medical reasons, claiming that she’d started “frothing at the mouth” and he throwed her through the porthole because he was panicking.
The killer was originally sentenced to hanging but escaped the death penalty as there was then a no-hanging bill being talked about in parliament.