Seabourn Pursuit

Seabourn Pursuit is the second of Seabourn’s two purpose-built expedition ships, delivered by T. Mariotti at Genoa on July 31, 2023 and in service twelve days later. Structurally she is Seabourn Venture: the same CIMAR-built hull, the same PC6 Polar Class rating, the same 264 suites, the same two submersibles and twenty-four Zodiacs, the same eight guest decks with the Discovery Center and the Bow Lounge on deck six. What she is not is a ship with the same job.

Australia, which her sister does not do

Venture works the North Atlantic. Pursuit works the Kimberley, and a third of her sailings are in Australian waters.

She arrived in Australia for her first Kimberley season on June 12, 2024, and the pattern has held since: six ten-day expeditions a year, run between Darwin and Broome in the dry season, on a coast with almost no infrastructure and tides that move ten meters. The itinerary is Zodiac work almost from end to end, up rivers, into sandstone gorges, ashore for rock art and ranger-led walks with Traditional Owners. Nothing about it resembles a port call.

Seabourn made the connection formal in a way no cruise line had before. The godparents of the ship are the Wunambal Gaambera Traditional Owners, named during a voyage through the Kimberley in June and July 2024, the first time Aboriginal Traditional Owners have been asked to name a cruise ship. The line funds an arts enterprise for Wunambal Gaambera artists and the Uunguu Experience ashore is delivered by the community rather than staged for it.

Titania

On October 14, 2024, on a South Pacific repositioning, one of her submarines put six people on the wreck of the German supply ship Titania, scuttled in November 1914 and unseen since. She lies 95 meters down, four and a quarter nautical miles off the northwest coast of Alejandro Selkirk Island in Chile’s Juan Fernández archipelago.

The way they found her is the part worth telling. A local fisherman, Gino Perez, knew roughly where she was; the expedition team worked with him, and he went down in the submarine with them. The island’s harbor master confirmed nobody had visited the wreck in the 110 years since she sank. That is the argument for a submersible on a passenger ship, made once, properly.

Where she actually sails

Antarctica is her largest single region. Those voyages leave from Ushuaia, and the booking lists Buenos Aires airport as the start point because Seabourn flies you down as part of the fare. The Australian season follows in the southern winter, out of Darwin and Broome. She keeps a shorter Arctic program than her sister does, a stretch of Iceland and Greenland sailings out of Reykjavík, and a handful of European voyages around the repositioning.

Her voyages run from a bit over a week to eleven weeks, with three weeks the usual length. The long ones are mostly the deliveries between hemispheres, which she sells as expeditions in their own right, and which are how she ended up over a wreck in the Juan Fernández islands in the first place.

Who she suits

The same people her sister suits, sorted by geography. If you want the Antarctic Peninsula and the Kimberley, she is the ship; if you want Svalbard and the Northwest Passage, book Venture instead. There is no meaningful difference in what is aboard.

She is a poor fit for anyone who wants a fixed itinerary; ice, tide and weather rewrite the plan and the expedition team will tell you so on the first evening. She has nothing for children, no theater and no casino, and the evenings are a lecture, a small ensemble and an early night before a six a.m. Zodiac call. The Kimberley in particular is physically demanding: hot, humid, wet landings, and a lot of climbing over rock. And she is priced at the top of the market, which is worth weighing against the fact that the submarine seats twelve people at a time and 264 guests would like a turn.