Keeping people on board might be about passenger safety as much as anything. Or it might be a delay for customs formalities.
I imagine that the captain of the ship has this authority based on the jurisdiction the ship is registered in. I assume this is spelled out in the legal documents that passengers sign.
Depending on the situation, police from the local jurisdiction could conceivably be stationed on the land end of the gangplank.
If someone wants to jump overboard and swim to shore, no-one could stop them. But they would then have to work through the customs/immigration authorities in that jurisdiction. Potentially messy.
But this is hypothetical. It sounds like passengers were taking day trips on the island. Hardly a floating gulag.
Great points. I know that things are interesting on these excursions. The passengers have to be aware of the possible consequences of their actions. I was not intimating a gulag situation. My comments were triggered by the experience of a guy I knew that was working a cruise line operating around the Hawaiian Islands. Now, he was not a passenger, but an employee, so I am not sure how different it would be. Anyway, he got ticked off and quit. He gave them his badge and was going to just leave the ship. They (some other employee) physically blocked his departure from the ship and told his he could not leave before doing paperwork for the company and so on. He tried to alleviate the situation by asking a question about his right to leave the ship. It was docked and people were coming and going. So, as you can imagine, things got heated. He called 911 saying he was being held against his will. Needless to say, the guys with guns and badges showed up. When they sorted it all out, the guy was within his rights to make the call he did. He could have proceeded with legal action. As it stands, they let him off the ship, the company "reeducated" the employees about things along those lines.
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