What Is a Cruise Book?

A cruise book is a U.S. Navy ship’s yearbook — a printed record of a single deployment, made by the crew, for the crew.

Where a school has a yearbook, a Navy ship has a cruise book. At the end of a deployment, a volunteer staff aboard ship gathers photographs of every division and department, candid shots from the line periods and the ports, the ship’s route, and a record of the cruise, and has it printed in a hardbound volume. Each Sailor can buy a copy to take home.

They are not official Navy publications — they’re compiled by the crew and printed ashore by specialized publishers — which is part of what makes them so personal, and so scarce decades later. A cruise book is often the only place a Sailor’s face appears in the record of a deployment.

This archive preserves one such book: the USS Constellation (CV-64) cruise book for the 1994–95 Western Pacific and Persian Gulf deployment.