The Pandemic Forced These Teens to Sail Home Across the Atlantic

Each installment of The Friendship Files features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.

This week she talks with four teens from the Netherlands who were aboard a schooner called the Wylde Swan for a study-at-sea program in March, when the coronavirus pandemic began shutting down travel. Unable to fly home from Cuba as they’d originally planned, the students (and crew) sailed across the Atlantic Ocean instead—all the way back to the Netherlands. They discuss how the experience bonded them—and some of the shenanigans they got into along the way.

The Friends:

Wouter Heeremans, 17, who lives in Havelte, the Netherlands
Blanche Krabbe, 16, who lives in Amersfoort, the Netherlands
Jona, 16, who lives in Amsterdam. (His parents requested he be identified by his first name only.)
Frederique Zandbergen, 16, who lives in Tilburg, the Netherlands

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Julie Beck: Let’s start with what was supposed to happen. Tell me about this sailing trip. It was a study-at-sea sort of thing?

We would go first to islands [in the Caribbean] like Dominica and Jamaica, then eventually we would end on Cuba. But plans were changed and eventually we had to do the ocean crossing and sail back to the Netherlands, because of