One day in May, nearly two months after the cruise industry suspended operations because of the pandemic, Chris Richardson stood on a pier on a private island in the Bahamas waiting to board his third cruise ship in six days.
Mr. Richardson, a Canadian ice skater, had been a performer on the giant Liberty of the Seas cruise ship when Covid-19 struck in late March. Since then, his employer, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., had been transferring thousands of idled crew members from ship to ship in what seemed like an endless quest to get them home.
As he streamed by throngs of seafarers waiting to board ships, he saw many without masks. “We had no idea if anyone was infected with Covid,” he said.
The coronavirus pandemic hit the cruise industry early and hard. Outbreaks raced through hundreds of passengers on dozens of ships, sparking a chaotic weekslong effort to get paying customers off the boats and back to their home countries.
For more than 125,000 crew members, though, that was only the beginning. Long after passengers were gone and the cruise-ship story had faded from the headlines, thousands of employees were still stuck on the vessels, far from their homes in India, Indonesia, the Philippines and other far-flung nations and largely barred from boarding commercial jets to return.