MS Hamburg

History: MS Hamburg is a 15,000-ton, 420 passenger, luxury cruise ship owned by the Conti Group and is now operated by Plantours Kreuzfahrten. She was built in 1997, in Wismar, Germany. Her relative small size allows her to transit the Great Lakes in North America, where she cruised seasonally between 1997 and 2011, as well as other cruises worldwide as travelling the Mediterranean for cultural cruises with Martin Randall Travel, the north Atlantic and at Asia. Her crew consists of 170 members, and her top speed is 16 knots. She was previously known as Columbus for Hapag-Lloyd, she was since replaced by Columbus 2.

Owner: In 1970 Bavarian entrepreneurs founded the CONTI shipping company, which came to be known simply as CONTI across the world. Since its inception, the name CONTI has stood for success in structuring, management and sale of ship investments.

Flag: The Bahamas became a British crown colony in 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy. After the American Revolutionary War, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists to the Bahamas; they took their slaves with them and established plantations on land grants. African slaves and their descendants constituted the majority of the population from this period on. The slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807; slavery in the Bahamas was abolished in 1834. Subsequently, the Bahamas became a haven for freed African slaves. Africans liberated from illegal slave ships were resettled on the islands by the Royal Navy, while some North American slaves and Seminoles escaped to the Bahamas from Florida. Bahamians were even known to recognize the freedom of slaves carried by the ships of other nations which reached the Bahamas. Today Afro-Bahamians make up 90% of the population of 332,634.

The Bahamas became an independent Commonwealth realm in 1973 with Elizabeth II as its queen.