Seventeen passengers from the cruise ship Carnival Conquest were robbed at gunpoint on June 13th during a cruise-sponsored excursion to a Jamaica banana plantation while the ship was visiting Montego Bay.

The passengers, including a half-dozen children, were touring the Lethe Estate owned and operated by former Jamaican Tourism Minister Francis Tulloch.

“They took our cameras, they took cash, passports, IDs, anything of value they could find, and then they went back into the bush,” passenger Kenneth Williams told reporters on the cruise ship's return to Galveston, TX, on Sunday June 17th.

“One of them had the gun right in my daughter’s face, she was pleading for her life,” Williams told KHOU-TV.

While Carnival subsequently said Jamaican authorities apprehended one of the suspects and recovered most of the stolen items, Jamaican newspapers reported the suspect was killed in a shoot-out with police.

News of the incident -- which occurred at the first port on the ship's western Caribbean cruise -- swept through the ship, with many passengers reportedly convinced they were lucky to have not suffered a similar fate.