American Star

American Star is one of the older small ships American Cruise Lines still runs, and she is useful mainly as a picture of what this company built before it settled on the formula it uses now. She came out of Chesapeake Shipbuilding in Salisbury, Maryland and entered service on the second of June 2007 with a seven-night maiden voyage on the Chesapeake Bay out of Baltimore. She is 215 feet long, forty-six across, and 1,973 gross tons, a small coastal ship rather than a riverboat, with no paddlewheel and no pretensions to one.

Before the balcony was standard

Every ship American Cruise Lines has delivered in the last decade puts a private balcony on every stateroom. American Star predates that decision. The description the line gave when she was new was of oversized staterooms with private verandahs and large opening picture windows (two products, not one), and that is still the shape of her accommodation. If a balcony is the reason you are looking at this fleet, check the cabin category rather than assuming.

What she does have is the layout that has survived into every ship since: four decks with an elevator serving all of them, four lounges of different sizes, a library, and one dining room with panoramic windows and a single open seating. There is no casino, no theater and no second restaurant.

Her capacity has moved. She opened carrying a hundred passengers and the line lists her at ninety today, which is a low number even by the standards of this fleet and means the ship is emptier per square foot than she was designed to be.

Where she actually sails

Providence, overwhelmingly. Almost her whole calendar is the eight-night New England Islands cruise, round trip out of Providence, Rhode Island, Newport across the bay, Bristol at the head of it, then Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. It runs from midsummer into October and it is the shortest-legged itinerary anyone in this fleet sells: a few miles between calls, an island a day, and water sheltered enough that the ship is rarely out of sight of a shoreline.

That density is the argument for her. Nantucket, the Vineyard and Block Island are places a large ship either skips or anchors off; a ninety-guest hull is sized to the harbors themselves, so the morning ends at a gangway onto a street rather than in a tender queue. And the calls are not interchangeable: Newport for the Gilded Age houses and the harbor it was all built to look at, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard for the whaling money that came before it, Block Island for the bluffs and almost nothing else, Bristol for the boatyards and the oldest Fourth of July parade in the country.

Two things follow from a schedule shaped like that. The first is that she is a ship for people who do not want sea days; there is no real open-water passage in the week beyond the run down Rhode Island Sound, and the ship is at a dock or an anchorage most mornings. The second is that her working year is short. Island cruising in New England is a summer product, and once it closes the Chesapeake runs are the only thing left on her calendar.

Either side of the island season she goes south to the Chesapeake, and it is a handful of departures rather than a season of its own. There is a Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay week one-way between Washington and Baltimore, a bay round trip out of Baltimore, and the eleven-night American Revolution cruise that runs from Washington through to Philadelphia, Annapolis, St. Michaels, Cambridge, Norfolk, Yorktown, Jamestown and Williamsburg, with days spent cruising the bay and the Delaware. That trip is the only time in her year she works south of New York.

Who she suits

Travelers who want southern New England at close range (old money, old whaling towns and early American history), and are content for the ship to be transport and a bed. The passenger list is ninety people for a week, which means you will know most of them by the end; whether that is the appeal or the problem is the question to answer before booking. Getting ashore is easy throughout: alongside berths, short gangways, an elevator to every deck.

She is wrong for families, wrong for anyone expecting a modern ship, and wrong for anyone who wants a choice of anything at dinner. And she is not the only way to buy her own itinerary: American Independence runs the same New England Islands week out of the same Providence berth, three years newer, four feet wider and fitted with stabilizers, with a Maine season on top of it. If the cabin matters more to you than the calendar, that is the one to look at instead.